John Kitchin <jkitc...@andrew.cmu.edu> writes: > Why cannot there be a list of acceptable keywords eg > > [citenum: > [citeyear: > [citeauthor: > > which a backend would be responsible for handling, including a default > handler for unknown keywords?
It has the same problem as [pre @key post] syntax: it is slower to parser. This is because you cannot know beforehand the keyword, so you have to check almost every [...] in the document. Another option is to mimic custom links, if that's what you're thinking of, which means to store every user-defined keyword in a variable and build a regexp out of it. I dislike it even more because the document is not portable anymore, as it requires you to share your custom keywords. If year, or author, are needed, I suggested to append some optional parameter to the key, e.g., [cite: pre @key:year post] Note that it rules out colons from KEY syntax (but we can use another less common character, e.g. "|"). Regards,
