At 02:51 AM 7/29/2005, Bob Easton wrote:
John Gruber has an article at "Daring Fireball" which shows another way of
doing footnotes that has very simple markup and includes a return link
that is both attractive and convenient.
http://daringfireball.net/2005/07/footnotes
I took a look at the accessibility of the techinhque here:
http://www.access-matters.com/2005/07/23/daring-fireball-footnotes/
Thanks, Bob, that's very interesting. I would have found the screen
readings perilous to navigate! You really have to have a hair-trigger
finger on the ENTER key. Do the screen readers let you jump back half a
dozen words with one keystroke? I can imagine using such a function a lot.
John Gruber's article reminds me of another complication to footnoting: the
granularity of the body-text references:
In print, we can put a footnote number at the end of a passage of text
which means simply "branch to footnote here." It doesn't stipulate how
much of the preceding text is the actual reference. In some cases it seems
obvious: if the footnote number immediately follows a book title, a name,
or a quotation. However, in many cases, the footnote refers to the last
logical point made in the discource, which could be anything from the last
few words to the last several sentences.
In a web page we can mimic this model closely, as John Gruber has done,
including the footnote number in the display (to aid readability when it's
printed) and using it as the link to the footnote text and vice-versa.
However, in a web model that doesn't reveal the footnote numbers but
instead links the body-text reference words themselves to the footnote, the
author is forced to be more specific about exactly which words comprise the
reference. This isn't a mere technical detail, it can significantly alter
the meaning of the text by injecting a component of specificity that would
not be present in a print-only version.
Cosmetic styling is another issue. If it's the last entire sentence or
paragraph that's being footnoted (say in the case of a paragraph-long
quotation), do we contain the entire passage in an anchor tag? Depending
on what :link and :hover styling we're using, this could be enormously ugly
and could appear to inappropriately emphasize the linked passage for the
reader, the way it would were it italicized, bolded, or underscored for
emphasis.
These considerations are persuading me that hyperlinking text references
for footnotes works well only when there's a matching specificity between
print and web -- when the text being footnoted is a discrete (and small)
number of words. There still must remain room in one's footnoting model
for placing an explicit footnote reference at the end of a passage that is
a hyperlinked number or other symbol and not any of the text itself.
Ponderingly (if not ponderously!),
Paul
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