As someone who does a fair chunk of legal writing, I sorely miss citation signals when doing other kinds of writing. The ability to make a specific kind of reference to a source other than a direct citation opens up a lot of expressive flexibility, particularly for research writing. The ability to say “hey, here’s a couple of examples of my point” (see, e.g,), “here’s some general background material on this topic” (see also), or “this is an analogous but not directly applicable source” (cf.) in a standardized, efficient way is something other disciplines could do to have.
What prevents you from using these same signals in other writing?
I think you could do this elsewhere. The only change outside of legal briefs is to put all this sort of stuff in footnotes, rather than inline.
Confusing title, I thought this was to be an article about using signals on UNIX compatibles.