Impact and design constraints for site/XRef builds

[agoose77]

With MyST, we are positioning XRefs as the way to share content. That means we're encouraging scholarly authors to use XRefs to connect content across their own work, and further afield.

But, we currently build and deploy XRef information through a site build, which implicitly encodes assumptions about the web vs print distinction, such as image formats. Further down the road, we will increasingly want to distinguish how content is handled on web and print, and we must be careful not to end up in a situation where XRef content performs poorly when embedded in e.g. print media.

A concise summary of this topic is that we need to be careful to treat XRefs as a canonical sharing format.

Things to think about

• image resolution / formats
• only branching nodes
• placeholder types

[agoose77]

Tagging @rowanc1 and @stevejpurves as people that have spoken about this recently.