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

[Tom Gillespie]

In general I like John's suggestion. Org link syntax can be made to do
nearly anything because it is possible to bind link actions to
arbitrary elisp functions (I have used them to create buttons that run
source blocks for some of my non-technical colleagues). The grouping
of cross references under org-cite seems reasonable to me, and I would
love it if they could handle arbitrary references, e.g. to hypothesis
web annotation links or org-capture links.

Actually, having written this now, I think that both solutions have
their own use cases. Org cite is clearly about providing evidence for,
or a scholarly reference for something, and critically it can embed
some metadata about that reference in the document as a citation or
perhaps as an excerpt (and extension of what org-ref does now when the
cursor is over a reference?). Regular links do not provide any way to
embed metadata within the document, they are purely pointers.

That being said, it seems that there are a number of use cases where
org-ref links are simply internal document links that can point to an
element with a specific #+name: and no embedded information about the
target is needed. However, I think it would be a mistake to use up
equation/eq and table/tbl or figure/fig prefixes for references that
are internal to org, because it implicitly limits/collides with the
#+link: keyword.

Best,
Tom