[request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

Destry · 2010-06-07 08:56:56

There’s an old issue in web usability that comes up periodically in professional circles about whether to add links in copy or to list them at the end of article with numerical citations. Following is a comparative example of what I mean.

—-

Embedded link format:

This would be some example copy about beavers, and how they build beaver dams. This would be a full article and full of many other links, including links to beaver photos. Yadda yadda…

Link citation format:

This would be some example copy about beavers [1], and how they build beaver dams [2]. This would be a full article and full of many other links, including links to beaver photos [3]. Yadda yadda.
…
Link References:
[1] Beaver
[2] Beaver Dam
[3] Photo of Beaver

—-

Recent research on this old issue strongly suggests that embedding links in text, no matter how well it’s done, impacts a person’s ability to process, remember, and learn the primary text they are reading (compared to print copy). The links are just too distracting because people start following links around and don’t really think about what it was they were initially reading (not as deeply as if reading a book, or letter or what have you).

I, for one, would be willing to adopt a citation format if there was less manual overhead in doing so. As it is now it’s too daunting for one simple reason: If you change the of order links (like I often do when drafting articles), you have to edit the order of the link list at end of article, and then go through the entire article and renumber referrals to match the list. That’s much more time consuming that just moving paragraphs around with links already embedded (and why most people don’t bother).

So, I have no idea if this would be possible, but it would be nice (and I’d pay towards a ransom) if the link list and reference numbers auto-adjusted based on changes to the ordering of referral numbers in copy.

For example, If I started with the draft above in citation format and made the following edits to copy (which is essentially some rewrite and moving links with their original referral numbers)…

This would be some example copy about beaver dams [2] and the little critters that create them — beavers [1]. Etc…

Both the inline referral numbers and the link list would auto-adjust somehow to reflect correctly without me having to do anything more than edit the copy as you would normally do when working in a draft…

This would be some example copy about beaver dams [1] and the little critters that create them — beavers [2]. Yadda yadda.
…
Link References:
[1] Beaver Dam
[2] Beaver
[3] Photo of Beaver

Last edited by Destry (2010-06-07 09:01:18)

Destry · 2010-06-07 09:09:55

Now that I think about it, this is probably too difficult, though MS Word does something very similar with footnotes. Maybe that’s worth exploring…

In Word, the process is to first highlight some text to be foot-noted, followed by a menu selection of some sort to add the footnote (I’m working off memory here). An author then goes to bottom of page, finds the footnote number that was automatically added and types in the corresponding footnote text. The bridge between the inline number and the actual footnote is then made. If it changes order in the copy, the numbers change in relation.

For web, maybe it follows that pattern but slightly different. Maybe there’s a custom Textile link mod, and when applied to a given string of text it adds the citation number to that string. When saved in draft mode, a new textarea box appears in the Write panel (logically under the Excerpt box) showing the newly added citation number (at this point the bond is made between inline and at-end objects) and allows the author to add the desired link URL.

As you would expect, when viewed in front-end, the citation list appears at the end of the article, can be formatted as desired, etc. Any subsequent changes to the article draft (via a “save” of the draft), specifically changes to the order of inline references numbers, updates the number’s value inline and in the list, and adjusts the ordering of the list, respectively. If an inline string is deleted from the body copy entirely, the corresponding value in the citation list is also automatically removed.

I can imagine some mockups for this, but I don’t know if it’s possible dev-wise.

Maybe a custom Textile link would be something like, "Text String":###, where the three “###” tells Txp to treat that link style as a link referrer value.

Last edited by Destry (2010-06-07 09:50:28)

wet · 2010-06-08 05:40:35

To resume: You propose to implement the concepts of MediaWiki’s Cite extension into Textile or some other kind of thingamagic?

maniqui · 2010-06-08 14:42:18

I’ve been reading an article about this (inline links on article vs list of links at bottom of article), and it’s an interesting research. Regarding an automagical solution, imho, the easiest way to achieve it is using some JS/jQuery.

In fact, it may be possible to create a two-way jQuery plugin. I mean, a plugin that fetches all links inside an div.article, removes them, and split them nicely as a list at bottom. And, the same plugin could fetch a list of links at the bottom of an article, and add them inline, at certain placeholders (ie. <span class="link">some text</span>), iterating over them.
Then, it will be just a matter that our visitors choose on a button to enable/disable inline links.

I may try to code this on jQuery someday, although it’s currently a bit out of my league.
But if some jQuery guru is reading this, feel free to borrow the idea and create the plugin ;)

masa · 2010-06-08 15:53:00

While I don’t like inline links for aesthetic reasons, listing them at the end can actually make the article more difficult to use.
I don’t enjoy having to manually scroll down and up again to find these references.
I agree however, that it starts to make more sense as the number of links increases, but for only a few, I wouldn’t bother.

In my opinion the real problem with inline links is, that authors usually fail to add descriptive title text as to what the link is about: is it pointing at an image or another article, is it a link to an external or internal resource etc.?

That would allow users to make an informed decision before clicking.

Destry · 2010-06-24 14:11:30

Sorry guys, I could have swore I subscribed to this thread, but I guess not.

masa wrote:

While I don’t like inline links for aesthetic reasons, listing them at the end can actually make the article more difficult to use.

Well, that would need to be proven from user studies, I would think, but studies do show that embedded links make content more difficult to understand, remember, etc. So another question here might be what’s more important — optimally understanding the immediate content being consumed or the general “use” of the article? Again, the reason links are at the bottom is so readers don’t run away from the article right away; they read and process the primary content first, then follow up with the external references.

I think this is one of those situations where a prototype would need developed and tested for cognitive results beyond just functional utility.. just to see of all the coding was indeed worthwhile.

I agree, though, if you don’t have too many links, it weakens the need for any dramatic wizardry.

wet wrote:

You propose to implement the concepts of MediaWiki’s Cite extension into Textile or some other kind of thingamagic?

That extension does seem to have the same idea. Whether it’s footnotes or link citations, I guess it works the same, so long as you can put a link between the ref tags. If I understand it right, you put a self-contained references tag (<references />) at the end of the article, and create inline references to feed it.

So if I typed this in the body…

Scientists say<ref>link to external article</ref> the sun is quite large.

It renders like this…

Scientists say¹ the sun is quite large.

And outputs the noted link in the bottom list…

Link References:
.
¹ The Sun is Hella Big…and Hot!

As for how this might be done—Textile, Txp tags, plugin—I’m not able to say.

Anyway, I’m not losing sleep over it. It’s just an interesting concept that seems to have a lot of implications on a bigger scale.

net-carver · 2010-07-01 23:40:53

Folks

This thread caught my attention and, as an experiment, I have a modified a local version of textile to do a lot of what Destry is asking for in the OP. It uses the usual textile link+title format but only kicks in if the class ‘cite’ is tagged on.

For example, this…

Scientists say["(cite) the moon is quite small(Proof of the small moon hypothesis.)":http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080801.html]. But I, for one, don't believe them.  Others claim it to be made of cheese["(cite).(Proof of a cheese moon.)":http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104361] If this proves true I suspect we are in for troubled["(cite) times(After all, things do go wrong)":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13#The_oxygen_tank_incident].

…gives rise to this in my preview pane…

The citation list reorders whenever the textiled body is changed and each citation number links to the correct line in the list, which in turn has a link keyed off the original title. It doesn’t have the usual footnote style reverse links from the footer to the body nor does it support anything like merging of citations in the list, using ‘ibid’ for identical consecutive citations etc, etc, etc. It’s just a proof of concept.

Having used this in anger for all of 10 minutes, I think something like an additional button on one of the textile-bar plugins would really help in building the textile link texts as they can quickly become cumbersome.

Destry, you posted first so you want to try it out?

Bloke · 2010-07-02 07:52:41

net-carver wrote:

Destry, you posted first so you want to try it out?

I’ll play too if you don’t mind :-) I’m currently dabbling inside Textile to fix a few outstanding issues so if this can be honed, proved to be solid, wildly useful and is a quick win we may be able to throw it in.

Last edited by Bloke (2010-07-02 07:53:50)

net-carver · 2010-07-02 09:01:42

bloke

You have email.

net-carver · 2010-07-02 16:11:08

All

New version available here. It’s based on the svn dev version of textile from about a week ago. Feel free to download it from that link and let me know what you think. I’m actively experimenting with this right now and the linked gist drops the requirement for a named class and instead uses what I think is a cleaner syntax like this…

Scientists ""say(Proof of the small moon hypothesis.|By Laurent Laveder)"":http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080801.html the moon is quite small.

NB. the double quotation marks around what would otherwise be rendered as an in-line link. If you were to forget to use the double ‘”’, you’d end up with a normal in-line link with a descriptive title. If you get it right then this would appear (approximately, that is) in your browser as…

Scientists say¹ the moon is quite small.

…and, as a citation footnote,…

1. Proof of the small moon hypothesis. By Laurent Laveder

The link’s citation text can be split using a ‘|’ and the second part can also use some basic textile formatting such as bold/emphasis etc.

maniqui · 2010-07-02 18:20:40

May it be the right time to share with you those crazy ideas living in the back of my head about an utopian new version of Textile?

Destry · 2010-07-02 21:18:40

I shall indeed give this a spin, Steve. Thank you!

an utopian new version of Textile?

As long as it includes Bloke’s definition lists. :)

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2010-06-07 08:56:56

[request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#2 2010-06-07 09:09:55

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#3 2010-06-08 05:40:35

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#4 2010-06-08 14:42:18

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#5 2010-06-08 15:53:00

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#6 2010-06-24 14:11:30

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#7 2010-07-01 23:40:53

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#8 2010-07-02 07:52:41

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#9 2010-07-02 09:01:42

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#10 2010-07-02 16:11:08

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#11 2010-07-02 18:20:40

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

#12 2010-07-02 21:18:40

Re: [request] Auto-numbering / auto-adjusting link citations

Board footer