Thread:Extension talk:Cite/Allow defining references not used in page text?/reply (3)

קיפודנחש, thanks for the reply.

Clarification: "if you want to maintain a bibliographic list at the bottom of the page, why even use the "Cite" extension?" Good question. The bibliographies I'm using have, on the most part, refs in text, but I want these to be optional. In other words, I want to be able to mix entries with refs in text and those without.

I know that this is possible in principle because it used to work a couple of years ago. The extension I wrote piggybacks on Cite -- A tag unwrapped into a tag in the text, and a tag added the ref into Cite's internal list of refs without changing the text. All citations then showed up in in the order they were specified in the text, some without back links. It worked fine with Cite as it was in late 2010/ early 2011.

This is now impossible due to stricter error testing in Cite, and I will go ahead & hack the extension to allow it so my syntax will work. I'll try to do so via method overloading in derived classes so there's no intervention in Cite, but on first inspection this didn't seem to be straightforward. My question is, then, if I end up changing Cite itself, would this be useful in the larger world, perhaps through or similar syntax, as you suggested -- and I gather the answer to this is, probably not.

Peace, indeed.