What's the purpose of the csl variable page-first?

In which case should it be used? Isn't the page-variable always the better variable?
  • edited 22 days ago
    There is no better or worse.
    Certain citation styles want you to only give the first page. It's enough information to find the article. It also saves space in a bibliographic entry if you want a condensed format.
  • (To be clear, page-first should not be in the data. It should be -- and is by Zotero -- be generated from the full range in page)
  • @adamsmith
    Ah ok that makes sense. But why is there an additional variable for this purpose? E.g. short-title is deprecated because it has to be implemented via form="short". Why isn't this method used for page?
  • It could be handled either way, but handling it via a new form attribute ('short' doesn't seem right here) has no advantage and it so it stays how it was originally introduced to avoid unnecessary changes.
    It's distinct from title-short and container-title-short because those actually do rely on the presence of different variables in the metadata and have fall-back behavior. I don't think calling them deprecated as in we do in the specs is quite right-- testing for if variable="title-short" is the only way to check if there's a short title in the metadata, which some styles do. They just shouldn't, ideally, be used in text variable calls.
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