But that’s not what I would like in Silverbullet, e.g. to just write Blah blah blah (@Smil12; p. 345) blah blah blah and see Blah blah blah (Smil, 2012; p. 345) blah blah blah if not inside the @Smil12 with the carret. And then, for example, if hovered by mouse pointer I could see full citation entry, or, if clicked I could be redirected to some templated virtual page (such as for the #tags) that will show the citation entry, or whatever, and to be also able to have citation entries indexed so that I could write some Lua widget to appear at the bottom of the page showing all citation entries referenced on the page. Something like that.
In other words, we already have tags that have some syntax and renders differently, we already have attributes that also have some syntax and renders differently. And both are indexed. And I would also like to have citations with some practical syntax and rendered differently, and, of course, indexed.
On the other hand - we can have both. Once having citation entries indexed we can just settle on some syntax for your internal links as well, such as [[ Smil, 2012 | @Smil12 ]] that will redirect to either what I suggest above (to a page showing the citation entry). I think both approaches can play together very nicely.
(@Smil12; p. 345)alone will render as([[ Smil, 2012 | @Smil12 ]]; p. 345)(in this case it will be expanded by some user-provided template, with some sane default one),- or you can customize it “on the fly” as you suggest
[[ Smil blah blah blah | @Smil12 ]].
Both will link to the indexed citation entry in some way. I love the idea, seems quite powerful, flexible-enough and almost complete. 