Ivan Mokanov, Deputy Director of LexUM and CanLII Editor, blogs about media/vendor neutral citations over at Cornell's  Vox PopuLII.
 
Media, or vendor, neutral citations (the type that you see assigned to judgments coming from the South African Constitutional Court (ZACC) and Supreme Court of Appeal (ZASCA); and the type assigned by SAFLII to all other documents) have been around in common law jurisdictions for much longer than we have used them in Africa. The idea is to have a citation to a case, assigned by a court/originating body, which allows the user to find that case irrespective of the medium (on-line or print) or title of publication. 
 
LIIs have build various products around citations, such as LawCite (covering most major common law jurisdictions including SAFLII data, available on SAFLII courtesy of AustLII) and CanLII's Reflex for Canadian law.
 
Such citations are universally adopted by courts and tribunals in Australia, the UK and Canada. SAFLII advocates for the spread of this practice in courts across the Southern and East African regions.