5.3 Granularity
The finest addressable unit in this corpus is the article — the
§N.M form of §5.1.
There is no addressing below it. Headings within an article are not numbered, and there is no scheme for citing an individual normative statement.
5.3.1 Why not #
An earlier corpus defined one: clauses numbered implicitly by counting
normative statements within the deepest enclosing heading, cited as
§3.2.1(4), with a validation rule for checking that a clause number
still resolved.
It was specified in detail and never adopted. Across thirteen documents it was used eighteen times, and never once in the current corpus. What it cost was real: every editorial change to an article renumbered the clauses after it, so every citation into that article had to be checked against a count that nothing computed.
Article-level citation has proved sufficient in practice. An article is small enough to be a useful target and stable enough to be worth citing.
5.3.2 Writing for citability #
Because the article is the unit, an author SHOULD size articles so that one is a sensible thing to point at. An article covering one rule is easy to cite; an article covering nine unrelated rules forces every citation to be approximate.
Where a single statement genuinely needs to be picked out, a citation MAY name it in prose alongside the article reference:
5.3.3 Reading an old citation #
A (N) clause suffix in older material, or in a code comment predating
this corpus, refers to the retired scheme. It SHOULD be resolved to an
article reference when the surrounding text is next touched.