Expanding Page Range Formats

I’m wondering whether the next version of CSL could provide expanded support for page range formats. In addition to the ones listed at http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#appendix-v-page-range-formats, I can think of the following additions:

I’m sure that one could find some other strange circumstances; there is probably some question of how thorough CSL should be with this.

Additionally, could the concept of page ranges within CSL be expanded to number ranges in general? I can’t think of any reason, for instance, why one wouldn’t want the style’s number range format to apply to a date range as well, and there are some odd cases where it would be applicable to a volume, issue, or series number range.

All best,

Andrew Dunning
PhD Candidate
Collaborative Program in Editing Medieval Texts
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto

I realized right after I hit the send button that a problem with my proposal to extend page range formatting to dates was staring me in the face: the OUP style guide normally requests minimal formatting, but does not want this applied to dates that span centuries (to avoid something like 1866–901). I rather doubt, however, that anyone would ever want a date written this way, so perhaps this could simply be added as an exception for date ranges.

All best,

Andrew Dunning

I’m wondering whether the next version of CSL could provide expanded support
for page range formats.

I’m sure that one could find some other strange circumstances; there is
probably some question of how thorough CSL should be with this.

I’m a bit hesitant to keep adding more and more page range formats.

Additionally, could the concept of page ranges within CSL be expanded to
number ranges in general? I can’t think of any reason, for instance, why one
wouldn’t want the style’s number range format to apply to a date range as
well, and there are some odd cases where it would be applicable to a volume,
issue, or series number range.

My gut feeling is that it’s better to have separate definitions of
range formatting for dates and all other numbers, so that they can be
configured separately. Volume, issue, and series number ranges don’t
come up very often (in practice and in citation manuals), so we
haven’t really thought about whether the page-range-format should
affect them.

Rintze

I’m wondering whether the next version of CSL could provide expanded
support
for page range formats.

I’m sure that one could find some other strange circumstances; there is
probably some question of how thorough CSL should be with this.

I’m a bit hesitant to keep adding more and more page range formats.

Any reason, besides the technical challenge?

I don’t see a problem with adding new algorithms. That’s the whole point
behind that feature.

It would be another issue if we had, say, 20 of them. But we only have a
handful?

I would support adding a few more options for popular citation style
guides as long as they’re unambiguously described. But I also would
like to keep down the burden of implementing all these options in the
CSL processors, and for CSL style authors to deal with them. I think
that one of the key strengths of CSL is in how it trades in
flexibility for simplicity (on the other side of the spectrum, you
could consider encoding styles with a complete programming language),
and I feel expanding CSL without constraint would hurt it.

Rintze