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My experience is that while scientists often write short but pithy papers where section references are sufficient, things are different in the Humanities. Literature specialists have to refer to author, title and page and often want to use a particular scholarly edition. Philosophers do the same when referring to the work of contemporaries.
I teach a fair amount of Plato and Aristotle and find online texts are a problem.When referring to Plato, it is essential to use Stephanus numbers, which will identify any sentence in his entire oeuvre. These appear as marginal numbers and letters in most print versions in both English and Greek. But the numbers simply don't appear in the online versions of Plato (except for the Perseus Project version). So I can't recommend them to students and don't use online versions myself.
(This is why I've never uploaded a Plato dialogue: without the Stephanus numbers it is useless to me. But with them it is irritating to general readers.)
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