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dalede said:
> I think paragraphs work for everything.
well, almost _anything_ will "work for everything"
if everyone agrees on how it will be implemented.
> After all a Stanza of poetry is really a paragraph in effect.
i know some people who would argue with you about that.
for a long time. they'd call you bad names for saying that.
> The idea is that the logical unit of the author is the paragraph.
maybe in your mind. but other authors could be very different.
> It is a cohesive thought and can often be determined
> easily even when the editions change.
i can show you edition-changes with changed paragraphs.
(but that's really neither here nor there, because any system
has to consider different editions to be different documents.
every pointer has to be relative to a specific edition, or else
you start getting into all kinds of very confusing messiness.)
> Paperback vs. hardback makes page number useless again.
not really. even if the pagination is different between the two
-- and sometimes it's not, but that's beside the point here --
when you're making a link, you simply link to one or the other...
> you are correct that text can be searched but sometimes
> there are duplicates if you fail to type enough and
> searches sometimes fail on word wraps. A specific reference
> is what is needed when referencing someone else's work.
there are some people who say that, because this issue is so
thorny right now, in our world of unstable documents, that
any text that you want to quote should just be included in
your own document. it's easy enough with copy-and-paste.
("what if you want to cite a whole article or book?", you ask.
then a system based on _search_ won't work for you anyway,
which is part of the problem with specifying such a system...)
-bowerbird
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