Re: Paragraph-Based Quotation in Place of PDF/Page-Based

From: peter murray-rust <pm286_at_CAM.AC.UK>
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 08:09:39 +0100

At 03:07 27/10/2006, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>In the online age, page/line-based quotation is obsolete (for current
>and forward-going text). Pages are and have always been arbitrary
>entities. A document's natural landmarks are sections, paragraphs and
>sentences. That is how quotations and passages should be cited, not by
>page numbers (though page numbers can be added in parens as a courtesy
>and curiosity, for continuity, for the time being, while pages -- and
>PDF -- scroll inexorably toward their natural demise).
>
<snip/>
This is an excellent idea - it solves several problems at once
including removing the need to work out the last page number of a
document (Do many people read papers backwards?). In many scientific
disciplines section numbers are not used and there is a semi
controlled vocabulary "Results and discussion", "Methods and
materials", etc. There are also sequentially numbered objects
"Figure2", "scheme 3" "equation iv", "table 5". Note that if the
document (or better datument) is in XML or XHTML then these can be
automatically and reliably found with modern free XML XQuery tools
"section[_at_title="results"]/para[3]".

For example when doing my RAE form I was required to put all this
page stuff - a simple DOI would have sufficed.

P


Peter Murray-Rust
Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics
University of Cambridge,
Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
Received on Fri Oct 27 2006 - 11:02:32 BST