Good God!
I create a new thread and leave it to percolate for 24 hours, while I take care of sick babies and a sleep deprived med-student wife, and i come back to a 3 page or 34 section argument about how to site references... a topic that will never come to a consensus, as the current system is truly just the evolution of a most popular approach based on what was available.
So I will put my 0.02$us in on this, and then I would take it as a kindness if people would let this topic drop... I will take it under full advisement that people would like to find things in their books...
The point of reference is to allow other people to get close to the information you are basing something on. The big issues are
- granularity (can I give them directions that get them close enough that they can find it in an arbitrarily decided "reasonable" amount of time)
- consistency (can everyone, despite different resources use these directions)
- longevity (will they still be able to find this in xyz large units of time in the future)
No system will be full proof. A reasonable compromise is to allow paragraphs to belong to a page number (whatever page they start on in a given print version) and allow a cross reference between the two. As ebooks become the standard, section and subsection are a nice way to reference down to a reasonable level of granularity (no one advocates chapter\paragraph\character range count, without being laughed at), but again a version number of some sort is of the utmost importance.
It is 99% likely that there will be a simple toggle to insert paragraph numbers into the xml of the book, 99% (dependent) chance that you will also have the option of having those numbers shown based on your output. Other than time, there is no reason why page number references could not also be added, with a slight loss to resolution (I am not a fan of adding page numbers in the middle of a small subsection whenever avoidable)
So with this set of solutions, if there is a 10 "page" smallest level of section... eather accept that it is meant to be only consumed as a single idea and a reference should reference the whole thing, or format it into smaller sections from the start. poems into stanzas, big-ass paragraphs into... only god knows....
I will make separate posts responding to the other 5-6 posts that have not gone down this path.
Thank you for the huge response all ready, keep it up
... just not about this particular topic anymore
