link soup

[Ian Gregory]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 03:43:47PM -0500, Mark Lawrence wrote:
 

> No. If there is to be a difference among the various types of notes,  

> I would vote to put literature citations in one group, and everything  

> else (explanations, digressions, jokes, etc.) in another,  

> irrespective of where the notes show up in the web or printed output.  

> Literature citations are different in that they are not themselves  

> content, but references to content elsewhere. Explanations,  

> digressions, etc. are themselves textual content.


Sorry to jump in here. I have been following the discussion but only
in a sort of cursory way. I just felt I needed to take issue with
what you have said here.

In one sense of course, literature citations are references to content
elsewhere, but in the context of (X)HTML they are not, because if
they were they would just be hrefs.

Not that I have any recent experience of technical writing, so forgive
me if I am talking rubbish, but it would seem to me that in XHTML you
either have a hyperlink to something or it is content on the page. If
you are going to try to put "traditional" literature references in XHTML
then they *are* just content on the page - content which happens to
be information required to track down (through manual means) a source
being referred to.

Of course if you are using Markdown to create printed pages (eg with
PDF) rather than the "default" XHTML then it is a different story.

Just a thought.

Ian

-- 
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/