At 05:16 PM 7/28/2005, Beau Hartshorne wrote:
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.
I would argue that a <div> at the start of a paragraph offers a good
tradeoff for long or closely-spaced sidenotes, at least in HTML.
LaTeX handles footnotes like this (from page 17 of Leslie Lamport's
"A Document Preparation System"):
Gnus\footnote{A gnu is a big animal.} can be quite a gnusance.
And DocBook does it like this (from http://www.sagehill.net/
docbookxsl/Footnotes.html):
<para>During the installation of the product<footnote><para>In
versions 2.3 and 2.4.</para></footnote> you may see messages such as
these.</para>
LaTeX and DocBook are actually semantically very close to the
original sidenote technique.
Yes, exactly. The LaTex and DocBook markups specify which word or words,
precisely, the footnote belongs to. When the markup is that specific, the
rendering engine has the opportunity to position the footnote very close to
the point in the body text it belongs to.
Your later technique pins the footnote to a whole paragraph, a much larger
block of text. This is totally OK for circumstances in which the footnote
or sidebar can belong equally to any of the words in a paragraph (such as a
sidebar with a guacamole recipe next to a paragraph extolling the healthful
effects of avacados) but it does not work for text requiring more precision
(such as the definition of guacamole next to the word 'guacamole' in the
body text).
The distinction is made extremely clear in a paginated medium. If a
paragraph is broken with a page break that separates the beginning of the
paragraph from the reference point in the body text, the footnote/sidenote
should appear on the same page as the reference point, not the same page as
the beginning of the paragraph.
In screen display, the same principle can be seen with long
paragraphs: you don't want the sidenote to appear much higher than the
reference point in the text or they won't both be visible at the same time.
Anyway, I don't want to belabor the point. Both approaches
(parargaph-specific placement and word-specific placement) have many
applications. I'm not saying one is better than another in any absolute
sense, merely pointing out the greater applicability of one technique for a
particular use. Your approaches to sidenote techniques that use pure CSS
are great. I'll be watching for more.
Cheers,
Paul
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