More appropriate use of DOI and URL fields

[pauloney]

There are a number of non-standard fields in use in BibLaTeX right now, things like:

• affiliation
• abstract
• eid
• keywords
• language
• price
• langid
• ....

that almost never see the light of the day in-print. But there are two, DOI and URL, which were never meant to be printed, and that because of popularity and choice of defaults -- show up in-print all the time.

There are DOIs that fall in the category of "sane" like, for example:

 10.37236/12

but most of them are not as short:

doi = {10.17323/1609-4514-2001-1-3-315-344}

some total gibberish:

doi = {10.21167/cqdvol16201923169664jpbntbt134162}

and some down to total insanity:

doi = {10.1002/(SICI)1096-987X(199803)19:4<377::AID-JCC1>3.0.CO;2-P}

So their appearance in-print serves no purpose -- no one is going to copy this from paper and type into a browser. As one of the undepinning of the web, they were never made to be displayed in-print.

The situation with URL is no different, or I should say even worst because of its ephemeral nature. Even for URLs that are session-agnostic, the length can be outrageous:

url = {https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/a-chilling-scientific-paper-helped-upend-us-and-uk-coronavirus-strategies/2020/03/17/aaa84116-6851-11ea-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html}

Right now the default setting of biblatex, on the standard styles, is to print these values out. It would be nice if we could have them used in a more appropriate way, which is to build a link on top of another piece, for example the title.

Other non-standard fields are already used in this way -- to help format the entry -- the clearest example being "langid".