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. Most of the refs in bibliographies I'm using are linked in the text, but not all. In other words, I want to be able to intersperse 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 -- it unwraps a tag into a tag in the text, and adds the ref given in into Cite's internal list of refs without affecting the wiki text. All citations then used to show up in in the order they were specified in original wiki text, with those supplied via without back links. This worked fine with Cite as it was in late 2010/ early 2011, but is now impossible due to stricter error testing.

I'll go ahead & modify my copy of the extension so the syntax will work, and I'll try to do so via method overloading in derived classes so there's no intervention in Cite itself. On first inspection, though, this doesn't seem to be straightforward. My question is, then, if I end up changing Cite itself, would this functionality be useful in the larger world, whether through or similar syntax as you suggested, or through an API function that can be used in extensions, such as mine, that build upon Cite? I gather the answer to this is, probably not.

Peace, indeed.