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

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 9:53 AM John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:

> > #+CAPTION: This is the caption for the next figure link (or table)
> > #+NAME:   fig:SED-HR4049
> >
> > [[./img/a.jpg]]
> >
> > Or some other metadata on the target?
>
> I don't think metadata on the target helps with the cases described
> above, you can reference a label in different ways at different times to
> get different meanings.

OK, this clarifies a key piece then.

I agree then: target metadata alone isn't enough.

So I see two options:

1. per my original response, allow optional typed internal links; e.g.:

[[fig/foo:file]]

To be clear, with this idea, I'm suggesting an alignment between
external links (which already have similar types) and internal (which
do not).

IUC, org-ref is using *external* link types (not internal links) to
make these distinctions?

2. extend citations, per your idea here, which to me means the
org-cite code would need to be revised and expanded to handle both
cross-references and citations, but do so distinctly.

E.g. an export processor like oc-csl would need to handle these
cross-references in that code, but pass the citations per se to the
citeproc-el backend, which should not need to worry about
cross-references.

Likewise, as a front-end developer, I don't want to deal with
cross-references at all, so I should be able to ignore them in my
insert and follow processors, in the same way you would need to be
able to include support for them.

And activate processors would need to be updated to distinguish them somehow.

Right?

It seems to me 1 is the easier path, both practically and
conceptually, unless I'm still missing something (which is certainly
possible).

Bruce