[Air-l] A note on (online) bibliography

[Joseph Reagle]

On Friday 20 October 2006 11:21, Douglas Eyman wrote:
> For unpaginated online material, for 
> instance, counting paragraphs makes far less sense than using the find or 
search 
> function of the browser (MLA does not take into account the actual 
differences 
> in print and digital interfaces to texts). I don't see myself counting 
> paragraphs so I can say that, for instance for a lengthy online document, 
the 
> quote appears in paragraph 71

Indeed, it took me some experimentation to conclude that reader paragraph 
counting doesn't work well.  (Though some publications of secondary sources 
will number paragraphs or provide section numbers that I will use.) In an 
e-mail, what counts as a paragraph? (Consider weird line breaks and nested 
quotations in a message.) In a webpage? (Do I count pairs of the <p> 
elements even if empty? What about <br/>?) I even wrote a local CSS 
stylesheet that numbered <p> elements [1]; and realized this was not 
reliable given the different browser implementations and that other readers 
would not have this stylesheet in any case!

The tricky bit of citing online works is that the change, finding text is 
easy enough as you say.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/generate.html#counters
-- 
Regards,          http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/
Joseph Reagle     E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65  BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E