At 03:50 PM 7/28/2005, Beau Hartshorne wrote:
Paul, Ben: To address the issue of overlapping elements, and very
long sidenotes, it might make sense to catch these exceptions and do
something like this:
<div class="sidenote">
<p>1. Note one.</p>
<p>2. Note two.</p>
</div>
<p>
Body copy.<sup>1</sup> More body copy.<sup>2</sup>
</p>
And a style rule like this:
small.sidenote span {
display: block;
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
Oops, there are no SMALL or SPAN tags in your example. You might have meant:
div.sidenote p {
display: block;
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
except that merely describes default styling for P tags.
To avoid so many exceptions, you could make a habit of referencing
the sidenotes at the beginning of each paragraph. If this is still
not enough for most cases, you can even scale back to sub-section or
section.
Ideally, you'd have the sidenote next to the point in the text that causes
it. A footnote reference could appear at the end of a very long paragraph.
It seems to me that your technique requires the author to tweak the markup
to accommodate the display to a greater extent than most people wish to
do. I don't want to have to move my footnotes from one place to another in
the HTML page to position them near their reference points; I want the HTML
to mark up the content semantically and the CSS (and/or JS) to do all the
positioning.
Paul: Numbering is not important for my site, the context is good
enough. In Tufte's books, he numbers sidenotes that refer to written
work, but not sidenotes referring to graphic work. Until generated
content is well supported, we'll need to do the numbering manually,
or with some <ol> hacking.
I wasn't talking about numbering. Rather I was trying to make the point
that it can be important to link a specific word or phrase (point) in the
body text with a specific sidenote. Positioning the sidenote 'somewhere
near' the body text point is sufficient for some types of content but
insufficient for many others, including I would say most technical and
academic writing.
In print, we use numbers, letters, or other symbols as the mechanism for us
to navigate the link between text and note. On the web, we might still use
such a mechanism internally but we don't have to display it, such as in
this example of mutually hyperlinked text blobs:
<div id="bodytext">
...
<p>Now is the time for all good <a id="link47"
href="#note47">munchkins</a> to come to the aid of their party.</p>
...
</div>
...
<div id="notes">
...
<p><a id="note47" href="#link47">Munchkins</a> are still a potent
political force in the Oz proletariat...</p>
...
</div>
In any case, in a sidenote-rich text you might choose to display the
linking numbers because people do print web pages.
How well-supported is generated content, anyway?
It's fairly well supported -- as long as you use Opera! (Kazoo sounds
off-stage.)
Regards,
Paul
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