One question I forgot: how should multi-author citations, currently denoted by ‘et al’ or ‘et al.‘, be handled? That notation is pretty ridiculous: not only does it take up 6 letters and is natural language which should be a symbol, it’s ambiguous & hard to machine-parse, and it’s not even English*! Writing ‘Foo et al2010’ or ‘Fooet al 2010’ doesn’t look very nice, and it makes the subscripting far less compact.
My current suggestion is to do the obvious thing: when you elide or omit something in English or technical writing, how do you express that? Why, with an ellipsis ‘…’, of course. So one would just write ‘Foo…2010’ or possibly ‘Foo…2010’.
Horizontal ellipsis aren’t the only kind: there are several others in Unicode, including midline ‘⋯’ and vertical ‘⋮’ and even down right diagonal ellipsis ‘⋱’, so one could imagine doing ‘Foo⋯2010’ or Foo⋮2010″ or ‘Foo⋱2010’.
The vertical ellipsis is nice but unfortunately it’s hard to see the first/top dot because it almost overlaps with the final letter. The midline ellipsis is very middling, and doesn’t really have any virtue. But I particularly like the last one, down-right-diagonal ellipsis, because it works visually so well—it leads the eye down and to the right and is clear about it being an entire phrase, so to speak.
* Actually, it’s not even Latin because it’s an abbreviation for the actual Latin phrase, et alii (to save you one character and also avoid any question of conjugating the Latin—this shit is fractal, is what I’m saying), but as pseudo-Latin, that means that many will italicize it, as foreign words/phrases usually are—but now that is even more work, even more visual clutter, and introduces ambiguity with other uses of italics like titles. Truly a nasty bit of work.
One question I forgot: how should multi-author citations, currently denoted by ‘et al’ or ‘et al.‘, be handled? That notation is pretty ridiculous: not only does it take up 6 letters and is natural language which should be a symbol, it’s ambiguous & hard to machine-parse, and it’s not even English*! Writing ‘Foo et al2010’ or ‘Fooet al 2010’ doesn’t look very nice, and it makes the subscripting far less compact.
My current suggestion is to do the obvious thing: when you elide or omit something in English or technical writing, how do you express that? Why, with an ellipsis ‘…’, of course. So one would just write ‘Foo…2010’ or possibly ‘Foo…2010’.
Horizontal ellipsis aren’t the only kind: there are several others in Unicode, including midline ‘⋯’ and vertical ‘⋮’ and even down right diagonal ellipsis ‘⋱’, so one could imagine doing ‘Foo⋯2010’ or Foo⋮2010″ or ‘Foo⋱2010’.
The vertical ellipsis is nice but unfortunately it’s hard to see the first/top dot because it almost overlaps with the final letter. The midline ellipsis is very middling, and doesn’t really have any virtue. But I particularly like the last one, down-right-diagonal ellipsis, because it works visually so well—it leads the eye down and to the right and is clear about it being an entire phrase, so to speak.
* Actually, it’s not even Latin because it’s an abbreviation for the actual Latin phrase, et alii (to save you one character and also avoid any question of conjugating the Latin—this shit is fractal, is what I’m saying), but as pseudo-Latin, that means that many will italicize it, as foreign words/phrases usually are—but now that is even more work, even more visual clutter, and introduces ambiguity with other uses of italics like titles. Truly a nasty bit of work.