Re: Expanding how the new cite syntax is used to include cross-references - thoughts?

[Bruce D'Arcus]

Here's a recent subthread on this question:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2021-07/msg00233.html

At the end of that discussion, my argument against using citations for
cross-references:

1. Cross-references are not citations, neither conceptually, nor in
software implementations. In LaTeX, MS Word, Libre office, InDesign,
etc, cross-references are handled differently than citations. There,
they are typed internal links. You can get a sense of how this works
in this tutorial for Word, which includes a list of cross-reference
types, and so hints at the range of things people need to internally
reference:

https://www.customguide.com/word/how-to-cross-reference-in-word

2. As John and Joost noted on that thread, because they're different,
they raise a range of implementation questions, most notably for me
what org-cite processors are supposed to do with these citations that
are not citations. As it is now, the user would just get errors and/or
unexpected output.

On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 1:28 AM Tom Gillespie <tgbugs@gmail.com> wrote:

...

> Actually, having written this now, I think that both solutions have
> their own use cases. Org cite is clearly about providing evidence for,
> or a scholarly reference for something, and critically it can embed
> some metadata about that reference in the document as a citation or
> perhaps as an excerpt (and extension of what org-ref does now when the
> cursor is over a reference?). Regular links do not provide any way to
> embed metadata within the document, they are purely pointers.

Right, which is what a cross-reference is.

It's just there needs to be some way to distinguish among types of
targets, I think.

> I think it would be a mistake to use up equation/eq and table/tbl or
> figure/fig prefixes for references that are internal to org, because it 
> implicitly
> limits/collides with the #+link: keyword.

Is there a workaround for this somehow, or an alternative that gets
the same thing in the end?

Bruce