For VisualEditor, we are continuously-bitten by <references /> tags that are embedded within generated content like the English Wikipedia's {{reflist}} (T52769).
It would be much easier for everyone if we just moved the features provided by such templates into Cite itself, possibly as HTML-like attributes on the extension tag, and allowed such templates to be replaced by the now more powerful <references /> tag.
Points of agreement include:
* The main requirements are for <references /> to support multiple columns and different list styles
* Columns should be implemented using [[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/column-width|column widths]] rather than [[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/column-count|column counts]], to allow flexibility based on screen size.
This task is currently blocked, on the following issues:
* What the default settings/algorithms should be
* Whether column widths and list styles should be customizable per-page, or only per-wiki
* If per-page customizations are allowed, whether they should be implemented by passing through CSS properties from the invocation of the <references /> tag or by applying CSS classes, which are then given CSS properties on a per-wiki or global level.
This would involve adding:
* columns (default to 1; a number between 1 and … another number? - not allowing width, obviously)
* list-style (default to decimal; just an escaped pass-through of the CSS list-style of the OL)
Then we could just bot-substitute uses of the template, and everyone would be happy.
**See Also**: T53145, T47132, T8019, T56906, T33597