Perhaps it is because I’ve been using this format for the last four
years, but I don’t know if I understand either of Frank’s two posts on
this subject. APL’s citation identifier does not use a hyphen in
citations (as he noted in the latter post). But it also cannot and
does not need to be composed by “standard CSL elements.” While the
issue number is a standard element, neither the subject area nor the
publication order are known.
The citation ID is just treated as if it were a page number in
reference managers & CSL can treat it the same way.
If you want to cite a particular page in an APL, locators still work.
The only deficiency I can think of to this substitution of an ID for a
page number is probably not a concern to CSL, but it might be to
reference management software: there is no way to know the length of a
paper given only the APL ID. This can be useful metadata, but is
rarely (if ever) cited. I tend to either keep this information in an
extra field or will subvert the page number field to store both the ID
& a real page range using ‘023507:1-3.’ It seems like online
databases store a wider range of variations to store this info
(‘0235071-0235073’, ‘023507(1-3)’, etc.). While it would be nice for
reference managers to standardize these variations on import (where
possible), I don’t think CSL should have to worry about them.
–Rick