Citing online.

Monday, 29 September 2003

While I’m sure some people (like Tim) have more of a right to rant about citing and footnoting (because they get to use APA-, Harvard-, and Footnote-style citations all at once, what joy), I’m going to do it anyway (when did inappropriateness stop me from ranting about something?).

I’m doing this on the web, and hence it’s about stuff in online formats. APA/Harvard-style citations are good enough for print given the limitations of the medium, and so I’ll not complain about them.

Given my interest in computers, I’ve read quite a few documents referring to computers with citations to other things. One thing I notice is that unlike Psychology, there is absolutely no consistency. Everyone thinks they’re using APA/Harvard-style even when they aren’t, so you get uglinesses like:

For example, [BKV] points out that experts … can differ by a factor of 5 [sic] on performance estimates of C constructs. (Anderson, 1994 p. 2)

Where quite clearly the [BKV] is a footnote-style, but it’s being run in with the text. As the file is distributed as a Postscript document, the paper citation format is acceptible; however, a footnote—anything in brackets or set off by dashes—is not text; one should be able to skip them without the sentence becoming ungrammatical (this is sometimes hard to do, and you can often see mistakes, but that’s clearly been done on purpose). If they wanted to keep to the footnote style, perhaps because that’s what their used to, or because BibTeX handles that better, or because their editors ask him to, well, then it’s okay to use footnotes. But then the sentence should’ve been recast; either of:

For example, it has been shown that experts … can differ by a factor of 5 on performance estimates of C constructs [BKV].

For example, Bentley, Kernighan, and Van Wyk [BKV] point out that experts … can differ by a factor of 5 on performance estimates of C constructs.

flow much better than the original (note also the plural pronoun for a plural subject).

However, I said I was discussing the web, and discuss the web I shall. It seems that many free software advocates have a desire to use the footnoting style on the web. While one can see the attraction for non-marked-up plain text emails, that someone would use it in HTML baffles me. Being able to avoid those ugly line breaks you can get by shoving a long, unbreakable hunk of text is desireable. Most online forums, however, provide access to the <a> tag; those that don’t generally have something like a [url] tag. And yet it is in these mediums that you see it most frequently! And it is not that these people don’t know HTML; on some occasions, you can see the footnote with the title of the page as a link! The better—indeed, only acceptable—way to provide a link to a webpage in marked up mediums such as HTML is the use of links.

Furthermore, the method isn’t all its cracked up to be on emails. In general, footnotes aren’t the best of ideas, especially when the content in them is the important thing. Footnotes are a way of preventing less important information from distracting the reader; they are even more skippable than bracketed text in that you should be able to skip them without missing any important information. Putting the links in footnotes, especially when the link is the prime reason for the existence of the email, is utterly, completely, totally and unforgiveably absurd. Keep the link with the text! (For disambiguation between it and punctuation marks, you may surround it with <angle brackets>. Angle brackets are more like quotation marks than brackets in use, and are perhaps misnamed.) The way that the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter provides llinks is stupid beyond belief. They’ll have lists of hundreds upon hundreds of packages, each ending with a number in square brackets. Then, after all of them, they’ll have a list of hundreds of upon hundreds of urls, each preceeded by a number. Anyone ever tempted to do it this way should be shot before they’re born.

The formatting of link text is also something of an issue. You should definitely make the link text readable on its own, unambiguously describing the destination (and hence not needing to use text like ’click here’—which is pretty bad anyway, considering that blind users might provide an instruction to follow the link without using any device capable of clicking). Slashdot and Kuro5hin both provide a list of related links automatically generated from links in the article. Opera has a ’link-only’ mode. I have heard a reasonable argument in favor of providing links like as: Cassowaries Rant (blog); however, almost all its advantages could be realised by providing a link such as the Cassowaries Rant blog or Tristan’s blog, Cassowaries Rant; the only one it doesn’t solve is the long tracts of unreadable ugly blue underlined text one, but this can easily be solved by the reader choosing to use a color other than blue for the link to be in.

I doubt, however, that even if I try till the end of time will I get these people to change their ways…

Footnotes

free software advocates: I say free software rather than Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) because typically these people are hard-line Debianers: this means of quotation appears to have started in the Debian Weekly News newsletter whence it spread to many Debian hardliners, as well as the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter.

(I may extend this at some stage.)