[IPOL discuss] citations in IPOL articles

[Nicolas Limare]

1. First, a short answer to Pascal

>> I have found a method for doing this, but it is rather ugly.  Here is
>> an example:
>> 
>>   "# References
>>   1. Historic paper
>>   2. Another paper
>>   ...
>>   The proof of this result can be found in <a href="#index2h1">[1]</a>."
>> 
>> 
>> Is there a better way to do this?

You can manually insert anchors into the reference list, and then use
these anchors for internal links.

8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------

# References

1. <a name="ref_foo"></a>Natsume Foo, Historic Paper, Journal of Blah
2. <a name="ref_bar"></a>John Bar, Another Paper, Journal of Articles

...

The proof of this result can be found in <a href="#ref_foo">Foo's
article</a>.

8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------

This way, you have one stable identifier per reference. And I think it
is better to use real text in the reference hyperlinks. Numbered
references like "[1]" were useful in the paper era when we needed to
search a reference in the reference list, but is not required anymore
with hyperlinks.

You can even do better with more HTML: use the "ref_xxx" names to
identify the references in the list instead of empty anchor tags.

8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------

# References

<ol>
<li name="ref_foo">Natsume Foo, Historic Paper, Journal of Blah</li>
<li name="ref_bar">John Bar, Another Paper, Journal of Articles</li>
</ol>
...

The proof of this result can be found in <a href="#ref_foo">Foo's
article</a>.

8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------8<----------

I'm afraid this is the best we can do for the moment, with the current
tools.

2. Now, answering to Daniel

> From my point of view it would most certainly be the best way to simply
> use bibtex-style references and a cite-tag in the markup.

I completely agree, BibTeX is the de-facto standard and should be
supported. One little problem with BibTeX is it lacks standardization
for electronic reference attributes such as URLs or DOIs.

> Things brings us back to the question about the requirements and choice
> of a content managament system.
> 
> I am currently trying to find a sustainable way to develop the
> web-interface. As I understood up to now, there are basically three
> "systems"
> 
> Demo Frontend (HTML+Ajax, Java, ...?)
> Demo Backend (Python-based code)
> Article CMS (IkiWiki)

For the moment the Demo frontent is only HTML. It could include
Javascript/Ajax/... if someone is willing to support it. I don't think
we should use Java, because a java applet is only inserted into a web
page and doesn't integrate with the surrounding environment
(HTML/CSS/JS), because the future of Java is quite unclear since
Oracle bought Sun, and because most of the things we need for the
frontend can probably be done with JavaScript+HTML5.

> I suggest to leave the Demo part as it is right now and would like to
> discuss the choice for content management.
> Therefore, I would ask you to comment on the requirements first in order
> to try to make a "bias-free" decision in terms of prior knowledge how to
> use the system. Next step would be to "bias" these results by looking at
> who knows how much about each system and would dare to take some
> responsibility there.
> 
> Can somebody reiterate the list of possible system choices and the one
> containing the long-term requirements?

I have three lists of requirements, from three points of view: author,
editor and administrator.

A. The core requirements for the author are:
   * the ability to edit an article page with rich text, media (image,
     video, ...), formulas, references, ...
   * the ability to upload some files for inclusion in the page
   * an easy to use syntax
   Authors would also like to recycle the the texts they already wrote in
   LaTeX for IPOL without too much work.

B. The core requirements for the editor are:
   * user management, ie the possibility to identify people, for...
   * access management, ie the possibility to define and modify who
     can read and/or edit any content (page or uploaded file) of the
     system, in a flexible way (for authors, editors, reviewers, ...)
   * retain the history of the modifications

C. The core requirements for the admin are:
   * supported, reliable software solution
   * with few dependencies 
   * manageable with console system tools

These are only the core features. I can think of tons of interesting
things to be done with this system, such as
* structured content of the articles, ie not putting everything as a
  long text but having special fields to fill for the references, for
  the source code, etc.
* triggering actions on update, for example recomputing all the
  embedded images when the source code is updated (this would be real
  reproducible research articles) or updating the doxygen
  documentation when needed
* mail notification on edition
* support for rich metadata (Dublin Core)
* user forum and review
* ...

The possible choices proposed were Mediawiki, Django, Drupal, Plone,
Joomla. There are lots of other options, as seen on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks

-- 
Nicolas LIMARE
http://nicolas.limare.net/                         pgp:0xFA423F4F
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