Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
Michel Fortin wrote: Le 6 nov. 2006 à 7:04, Matthew Raymond a écrit : Michel Fortin wrote: pThis paragraph has a footnotefnref for=my-footnote supa href=#my-footnote1/a/sup/fnref./p fnl fn id=my-footnote pThis footnote can contain block-level elements!/p /fn /fnl I have a similar view, although I have some refinements: | p annotation=my-footnote | This paragraph has a footnote | a rel=annotation href=#my-footnotesup[1]/sup/a. | /p | [...] | footnote | pReferences:/p | al | ol | li id=my-footnote | pThis footnote can contain block-level elements!/p | /li | /ol | /al | /footnote I think having an annotation attribute in the paragraph is redundant with the a rel=annotation element. What happens if the attribute is there and there is no link? Then there's no fallback for legacy user agents. Is your argument that fallback should be structured in such a way that it must be included? (Not that that isn't a valid argument...) What if the link is there with no annotation attribute? While you could imply that the a rel=annotation element applies to the immediate parent, there is not explicit markup that indicates the scope of the annotation, and readability is negatively impacted because the scope could start well before the a element occurs in the markup. Also, because a dictates the position of the annotation link, you're essentially dictating part of the styling. What if the user wants to move the annotation link to the beginning of the annotated text rather than the end? Or vice versa? While CSS3 may have some solutions, it's not something for beginners. I think the attribute is completely unnecessary. I disagree. Just |rel=annotation| could just be a microformat to anyone reading it, and it doesn't clearly establish the scope of the annotation. Also, you're mixing two different terms (footnote and annotations), I don't think that's a so good idea. I'm not married to the whole footnote idea. That was just there to give a structured higher-level container to the annotation list (al). And you're forcing your annotations to be part of a list, which makes difficult to put them in the middle of the text to style them as sidenotes. We could have annotation elements with optional annotation list parents: | annoAnnotation/anno | | al | annoAnnotation 1/anno | annoAnnotation 2/anno | annoAnnotation 3/anno | al | | annoAnnotation/anno | annoAnnotation/anno Or perhaps just drop the al, but I like the idea of that list type for numbering and reordering purposes. The user agent could reorder the items to the order they're linked to.
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
Michel Fortin wrote: pThis paragraph has a footnotefnref for=my-footnote supa href=#my-footnote1/a/sup/fnref./p fnl fn id=my-footnote pThis footnote can contain block-level elements!/p /fn /fnl I have a similar view, although I have some refinements: | p annotation=my-footnote | This paragraph has a footnote | a rel=annotation href=#my-footnotesup[1]/sup/a. | /p | [...] | footnote | pReferences:/p | al | ol | li id=my-footnote | pThis footnote can contain block-level elements!/p | /li | /ol | /al | /footnote In the example above, |annotation| serves the same purpose as the fnref element. This allows you to associate an entire block of text to the annotation rather than just a single point. The footnote element is there to allow more extensive content than a simple list. The al element is a list for annotations. It handles the ol element in the same way datalist handles select, making ol only significant for fallback purposes. Because al is a list, it can take straight li elements. The a hrel=annotation and its contents, when the child of an element that has an |annotation| attribute, can be ignored by the user agent and replaced with an annotation-specific presentation. If the |annotation| attribute is left off, the user agent can assume that the parent of an a rel=annotation element is the context of the annotation.
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
At 07:04 -0500 UTC, on 2006-11-06, Matthew Raymond wrote: [...] | p annotation=my-footnote | This paragraph has a footnote | a rel=annotation href=#my-footnotesup[1]/sup/a. | /p What if you want multiple footnotes in the one paragraph? p This span annotation=my-footnoteparagrapha rel=annotation href=#my-footnotesup[1]/sup/a/span span annotation=my-other-footnotehas two footnotesa rel=annotation href=#my-other--footnotesup[2]/sup/a/span. /p Like that? | [...] | footnote | pReferences:/p | al | ol | li id=my-footnote | pThis footnote can contain block-level elements!/p | /li | /ol | /al | /footnote [...] The a hrel=annotation and its contents, when the child of an element that has an |annotation| attribute, can be ignored by the user agent and replaced with an annotation-specific presentation. That would be good yes. The spec should then explicitly state that UAs may do this (or perhaps are even encouraged to do this). It would probably be good to provide some examples of possibilities even. If the |annotation| attribute is left off, the user agent can assume that the parent of an a rel=annotation element is the context of the annotation. What I miss in this is something to help users return from the footnote to where they were in the main text. I think we need to consider that a requirement. What about a rev=my-footnote attribute on the al list item, to allow UAs to offer users a mechanism to return to where they came from? (Downside would be that this would revive that old rel/rev can of worms...) Another thing is that whether the annotation should be considered a footnote, endnote or whateverelsenote seems to me a presentational issue, so I'm not that enthusiastic about calling it a footnote element. Why not simply annotation? You can then allow the author to decide where in the page, or in a group of pages, to place the annotation element, and use CSS for the presentational aspects. (You could allow the same with foonote, but that name suggest it must only be used for footnotes.) -- Sander Tekelenburg, http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
Le 6 nov. 2006 à 12:32, Sander Tekelenburg a écrit : Another thing is that whether the annotation should be considered a footnote, endnote or whateverelsenote seems to me a presentational issue, so I'm not that enthusiastic about calling it a footnote element. Why not simply annotation? You can then allow the author to decide where in the page, or in a group of pages, to place the annotation element, and use CSS for the presentational aspects. (You could allow the same with foonote, but that name suggest it must only be used for footnotes.) I agree that it's a problem with the name footnote. On the other side, annotation makes me think of something the user added in the margin, while footnote better evoke the complementary relation a footnote has with the text. While I prefer footnote, I think both can do fine. Michel Fortin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.michelf.com/
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
On Sat, 04 Nov 2006 19:21:42 +0600, Matthew Paul Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Footnotes and endnotes are identical in content in the context of a print document and I am not certain how they'd differ even presentationally on a web page, so yes, I think those can be considered identical in terms of markup. Scholarly books sometimes use both footnotes and endnotes for different things -- footnotes for citations and endnotes for tangential discussions, or vice versa. I've never seen an HTML document try to make this distinction, though. That's because HTML documents can only have endnotes so far. -- Alexey Feldgendler [EMAIL PROTECTED] [ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: Scholarly books sometimes use both footnotes and endnotes for different things -- footnotes for citations and endnotes for tangential discussions, or vice versa. I've never seen an HTML document try to make this distinction, though. Distinguishing footnotes and endnotes would require a multipage document: footnotes go at the bottom of this page, endnotes at the bottom of some other page. Since HTML5 is primarily about single pages, I suggest calling any such element footnote and not having a separate endnote element. This is a good example of picking fewer over more semantics as discussed in another thread. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold [EMAIL PROTECTED] Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
At 17:53 +0100 UTC, on 2006-10-31, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
[...]
W3C recently published a proposal on how to achieve
footnote/endnote presentations using the same markup [1]. The proposal
is quite simple. Given this markup:
div class=note../div
you would achieve footnoes with:
.note { position: footnote }
ane endnotes with:
.note { position: endnote }
I miss the semantic aspect. div class=note has no meaning. Something like
annotation would have. Once that's in place, I suppose you could indeed
offer CSS mechanisms to suggest a presentation as footnote, endnote, whatever.
Btw, I can perhaps vaguely imagine what display:footnote might look like, but
I have no clue what position:footnote might look like. I feel that this sort
of thing needs to be *much* more obvious from a spec, or else only a minute
elite will actually use such features (which in turn will give browser
vendors a reason to not even bother implementing support).
Another problem I have when thinking about the ideal spec for this is that
footnote seems to me very much a print concept, where you have a clear
concept of page. With a screen presentation however, there's the question
whether end of page == end of document, or whether it is the end of the
window (and scrolling takes you to the next 'page').
I mention this because I can imagine that in some situations you'd want notes
to appear at the end of the document, but in other situations it might work
better to have them at the bottom of the window, or at the end of a
chapter/section, which doesn't necessarily equal the end of the document.
Also, given the realities of scrolling, I think a useful implementation would
require a mechanism that allows the user to navigate back from the footnote
to the point in the text that references it. I'm not sure what mark-up this
would require though, especially given that a footnote might be referenced to
from different points of the text. Possibly an anchor-like mechanism would be
simplest, as it would allow a UA to allow the user to simply hit the back
button. (Althought that assumes the UA would go back to the specific point in
the page where the user was before -- some UAs instead still go back to the
top of that page.)
Another thought: it seems to me that something along the lines of the
longdesc attribute[*] might be useful for annotational purposes. The only
implementation I'm aware of is iCab's, which provides access to it through
its contxtual menu and loads the expanded description in a new window. That
too makes it easy for users to return to where they were. The downside of
longdesc of course is that it requires a separate Web page, which would
exclude the possibility of presentating the annotation in the same page.
Perhaps an longdesc-like annotation element should therefore require an
anchor (pointing to an ID within the current page), not allow URLs that point
to external documents.
[*] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#adef-longdesc-IMG
--
Sander Tekelenburg, http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
On Oct 31, 2006, at 7:20 AM, David Walbert wrote: ... Footnotes and endnotes are identical in content in the context of a print document and I am not certain how they'd differ even presentationally on a web page, so yes, I think those can be considered identical in terms of markup. ... Scholarly books sometimes use both footnotes and endnotes for different things -- footnotes for citations and endnotes for tangential discussions, or vice versa. I've never seen an HTML document try to make this distinction, though. -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
On Oct 31, 2006, at 7:57 AM, Alexey Feldgendler wrote: On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 21:54:12 +0600, David Walbert [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... I would never want to require that a footnote be read to anyone, thereby interrupting the text -- it is in the nature of a footnote to be optional reading and to stand apart from the text. Any user should have the option of reading/hearing it, or not. But how would the user know that there is a footnote anchored to a specific place? ... By a variation on the way the screenreader tells them there is a link anchored to a specific place. For example, an unobtrusive sound effect at each footnote reference, and a command to read the last-encountered footnote. -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
[whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
Le 30 oct. 2006 à 15:33, Ian Hickson a écrit : * note and reference for footnotes, endnotes, and sidenotes (not aside in “HTML5”) Yes, this is an area where document and converter authors currently need to come up with their own class-based hacks. Ideally a continuous media user agent could show footnotes in context so that they don't become de facto endnotes. If anyone has any ideas on this, please post them to the list. (The CSS group is also looking at footnotes closely.) One thing to consider when looking at footnotes is would the title= attribute handle this use case as well as what I'm proposing?. If the answer is yes, or almost, then it's probably not a good idea to introduce the new feature. Would the title attribute be suffisent? I don't think so. The main problem being that an attribute cannot contain any markup (links, emphasis, paragraphs?). I'm all for a syntax for footnotes (and sidenotes, and endnotes). The question is what do we want a footnote markup to accomplish? Minimally, it should associate a note with its context so that you know there is a note and that you can refer to it if you want. This definition encompass a couple of methods to do such notes that are in use currently, in HTML and elsewhere. 1. One of them, mostly used with sidenotes, is to have the note directly in the text: pSome text span class=sidenotethis is a sidenote to put in the margin/span and some other text./p With pretty trivial CSS, you can then put all the sidenotes in the margin. With some javascript[1], you can also create a list of footnotes at the bottom of the page. This method is also consistent with how word processors treat footnotes: as distinct pieces of text inserted punctually at some place in the main text but which are rendered elsewhere. [1]: http://www.brandspankingnew.net/specials/footnote.html 2. Some syntaxes meant to be written directly by humans, like Latex, also allow you to defer the note content until a later time to make things more readable. In these cases, you put a marker in the text, then associate the marker with the note content which can be placed elsewhere in the document. This make the text more readable. My own text-to-HTML tool (PHP Markdown Extra, semi-private beta version 1.1) use such a syntax: Paragraph linked to a footnote[^1]. [^1]: This is the footnote content. Some other paragraph. I'm not aware of anyone doing this for footnotes or sidenotes in HTML; it doesn't seem very practical to style either. 3. The last method of expressing footnotes in HTML is to create markers in the text and put the footnotes in an ordered list at the bottom of the page. For instance, my text-to-HTML tool generates this markup from the above example: pParagraph linked to a footnote supa id=fnref:1 href=#fn:1 rel=footnote1/a/sup. /p pSome other paragraph/p div class=footnotes hr / ol li id=fn:1 pThis is the footnote content. a href=#fnref:1 rev=footnote↩/a /p /li /ol /div This provides a trivial way to style footnotes as footnote, it'll even looks good unstyled and is completely backward compatible. - - - Before defining a markup for footnotes or sidenotes, I think it'd be a good idea to see what goals the syntax should fulfill. Is backward compatibility one of them, or should we always rely on the browser capabilities to relocate footnotes where they should be, or should we allow both? Some other things to take into consideration: * Footnotes should probably not be allowed to escape their enclosing article element. For instance, if you have a couple of weblog articles on your main page, each article having some footnotes, it'd probably not be a good idea to have footnotes from all articles mixed together in the same list. * Although not necessarily very common, some people like to put multiple paragraphs, lists, and some other block-level elements in footnotes and sidenotes (more often seen in sidenotes in books). I think it'd be a good idea to allow that in the markup. * Sidenotes may not be achievable in the browsers's default stylesheet without adding a side margin. They could always be displayed as float, but it seems to me that footnotes would be the best fallback mechanism. Sidenotes are also impractical on small screens too. That's why I believe that, ideally, footnotes and sidenotes should share the same markup, styling is what should make the difference. I'm not yet proposing any markup, I want to start the discussion on what it should accomplish, and what is realistic. Michel Fortin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.michelf.com/
[whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
Ian Hickson wrote: * note and reference for footnotes, endnotes, and sidenotes (not aside in “HTML5”) If anyone has any ideas on this, please post them to the list. (The CSS group is also looking at footnotes closely.) It would useful to look at previous work and discussion on this issue. http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/fn.html http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/footnotes.html http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/HTMLFootnotes.html http://daringfireball.net/2005/07/footnotes http://daringfireball.net/2005/08/notes_on_notes http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/07/footnotes_on_th.html Also, Wikipedia's markup for footnotes is good example of current practice and also a good use case for them. This example came from the HTML article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML sup id=_ref-0 class=referencea style= href=#_note-0 title=[1]/a/sup ol class=references li id=_note-0ba href=#_ref-0 title=^/a/b cite class=book style=font-style: normal;Raggett, Dave (1998). ia href=http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html; class=external text title=http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html;Raggett on HTML 4/a/i. Addison-Wesley, chap. 2: A history of HTML. a href=/w/index.php?title=Special:Booksourcesamp;isbn=0201178052 class=internalISBN 0-201-17805-2/a./cite/li ... /ol The actual wiki markup might be a useful reference too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes As for sidenotes, the markup you've used in the spec are good examples: p class=issueThis section on the codea href=#tabindex0tabindex/a/code attribute needs to be checked for backwards-compatibility. span class=issueWe could make this into a string value that acts as a Hint for why the command is disabled./span One thing to consider when looking at footnotes is would the title= attribute handle this use case as well as what I'm proposing?. If the answer is yes, or almost, then it's probably not a good idea to introduce the new feature. I really don't think so. There are accessibility and usability issues with the title attribute. * Screen readers don't read the title attribute by default. * Tooltips are inaccessible (in current implementations) to keyboard users, they require hovering with a mouse. * Users have no clear way of identifying which content has a tool tip, except for maybe abbr and acronym (which get a dotted border in FF). * It's also limited to plain text, when even the example from wikipedia contains additional markup. The first 3 issues could possibly be addressed by changing the rendering, but how do you identify a regular title attribute from one intended to be a footnote? Would it be appropriate for all of them to be treated as footnotes? I don't think so. James Graham wrote: I think and distinction between footnotes, sidenotes and endnotes is basically presentational and whilst we should try to ensure that markup+CSS can create all three appearances we shouldn't treat them distinctly. I agree that the distinction between footnotes and endnotes is just presentational. But I'm not so sure about sidenotes. We'd really need to look at books that make use of them and see on what basis authors actually decide to use footnotes or sidenotes. Do some authors use footnotes and sidenotes in the same book, or they exclusively choose one over the other based solely on presentation? Also, it wouldn't particularly matter if footnotes ended up being rendered as endnotes in printed media (which is how exisiting browsers render the wikipedia-style markup) but it would be nice if browsers could render them as footnotes at the bottom of each page. -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
On Oct 31, 2006, at 9:30 AM, James Graham wrote:I think and distinction between footnotes, sidenotes and endnotes is basically presentational and whilst we should try to ensure that markup+CSS can create all three appearances we shouldn't treat them distinctly. Footnotes and endnotes are identical in content in the context of a print document and I am not certain how they'd differ even presentationally on a web page, so yes, I think those can be considered identical in terms of markup. "Sidenotes," though, is ambiguous. If the term refers to footnotes that happen to be placed beside the text, then yes, they're identical semantically to footnotes. But "sidenotes" may also refer to "pull quotes" or "callouts" -- some small piece of text to be highlighted rather than additional explanatory information of the sort that would appear in a sidebar or footnote. Or, if "sidenote" refers to what is usually called a "sidebar," then we're talking about something that is both more extensive than the typical footnote and of greater importance relative to the main text -- its position on the side of the page is rather than at the bottom is not merely presentational but is indicative of the weight of the content. Moreover, a callout or sidebar is not a numbered or marked reference and need not be referred from a precise location within the text -- whereas a footnote or endnote relates to a specific word, sentence, or paragraph, a sidebar/callout/pullquote relates more vaguely to a more general section of text, or in the case of some sidebars, to the full article.So while markup for footnotes/endnotes could be standardized fairly easily (in as much as writing standards is ever easy), I don't even know where I would begin to define sidenotes semantically. As I've used them in print and on the web, they'd need to relate to (1) a header, and therefore to the section of text underneath it; or (2) a paragraph, list, or other defined block of text. But a sidebar might need to contain block-level formatting (and even multiple paragraphs and potentially headers), which means it couldn't be placed inside one of those elements. I don't know how many people would actually use magazine-style sidebars and callouts on the web -- I would, and probably a lot of newspaper and magazine publishers would, if there were a convenient way to do it. (I already do use pullquotes, but with some complicated markup to make them, I hope, accessible and semantically meaningful.) On the other hand lots of web authors do and would use footnotes/endnotes. So I am not sure how much effort it would be worth putting into markup for sidebars/callouts. David WalbertLEARN NC[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 20:30:44 +0600, James Graham [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: pSome text span class=sidenotethis is a sidenote to put in the margin/span and some other text./p This seems to have a poor backward compatibility story - in a non-supporting UA the note ends up in the flow. It can be styled to float and/or relocated by a client-side script. Indeed. +1 on this general idea -1 on the precise markup, in particular the divol structure for the list of notes (this should be a new element, if possible) and the use of sup. It would also be nice to reduce some of the excess baggage on the a element, if possible. The drawback of the tranditional markup is that it requires knowing the ordinal number of the footnote in advance. -- Alexey Feldgendler [EMAIL PROTECTED] [ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 21:54:12 +0600, David Walbert [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Does anybody know how blind users prefer footnotes to be read for them? I would never want to require that a footnote be read to anyone, thereby interrupting the text -- it is in the nature of a footnote to be optional reading and to stand apart from the text. Any user should have the option of reading/hearing it, or not. But how would the user know that there is a footnote anchored to a specific place? -- Alexey Feldgendler [EMAIL PROTECTED] [ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
Also sprach David Walbert:
On Oct 31, 2006, at 9:30 AM, James Graham wrote:
I think and distinction between footnotes, sidenotes and endnotes
is basically presentational and whilst we should try to ensure that
markup+CSS can create all three appearances we shouldn't treat them
distinctly.
Footnotes and endnotes are identical in content in the context of a
print document and I am not certain how they'd differ even
presentationally on a web page, so yes, I think those can be
considered identical in terms of markup.
I agree. W3C recently published a proposal on how to achieve
footnote/endnote presentations using the same markup [1]. The proposal
is quite simple. Given this markup:
div class=note../div
you would achieve footnoes with:
.note { position: footnote }
ane endnotes with:
.note { position: endnote }
Comments welcome.
Sidenotes, though, is ambiguous. If the term refers to footnotes
that happen to be placed beside the text, then yes, they're identical
semantically to footnotes. But sidenotes may also refer to pull
quotes or callouts -- some small piece of text to be highlighted
rather than additional explanatory information of the sort that would
appear in a sidebar or footnote.
Bert and I used sidenotes extensively in our CSS book [3]. The book
was written in HTML and we used negative margins to achieve the
effects we wanted. Here's some sample code [4], as well as an article
describing the efforts [5].
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-css3-gcpm-20060919/#footnotes
[3] http://www.awprofessional.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0321193121rl=1
[4] http://people.opera.com/howcome/2005/ala/sample.html
[5] http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom
Cheers,
-hkon
Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.opera.com/howcome
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:53:04 +0600, Håkon Wium Lie [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
I agree. W3C recently published a proposal on how to achieve
footnote/endnote presentations using the same markup [1]. The proposal
is quite simple. Given this markup:
div class=note../div
you would achieve footnoes with:
.note { position: footnote }
ane endnotes with:
.note { position: endnote }
Comments welcome.
I would also welcome something like
article::after { content: endnotes() }
...to indicate where all those endnotes should go.
--
Alexey Feldgendler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
Michel Fortin wrote: Le 30 oct. 2006 à 15:33, Ian Hickson a écrit : One thing to consider when looking at footnotes is would the title= attribute handle this use case as well as what I'm proposing?. If the answer is yes, or almost, then it's probably not a good idea to introduce the new feature. Would the title attribute be suffisent? I don't think so. The main problem being that an attribute cannot contain any markup (links, emphasis, paragraphs?). +1 I'm all for a syntax for footnotes (and sidenotes, and endnotes). I think and distinction between footnotes, sidenotes and endnotes is basically presentational and whilst we should try to ensure that markup+CSS can create all three appearances we shouldn't treat them distinctly. 1. One of them, mostly used with sidenotes, is to have the note directly in the text: pSome text span class=sidenotethis is a sidenote to put in the margin/span and some other text./p This seems to have a poor backward compatibility story - in a non-supporting UA the note ends up in the flow. 2. Some syntaxes meant to be written directly by humans, like Latex, (we should consider HTML to be such a language) also allow you to defer the note content until a later time to make things more readable. In these cases, you put a marker in the text, then associate the marker with the note content which can be placed elsewhere in the document. This make the text more readable. My own text-to-HTML tool (PHP Markdown Extra, semi-private beta version 1.1) use such a syntax: Paragraph linked to a footnote[^1]. [^1]: This is the footnote content. Some other paragraph. I'm not aware of anyone doing this for footnotes or sidenotes in HTML; it doesn't seem very practical to style either. This seems structurally rather similar to case 3 (below) albeit with a non-HTML syntax. 3. The last method of expressing footnotes in HTML is to create markers in the text and put the footnotes in an ordered list at the bottom of the page. For instance, my text-to-HTML tool generates this markup from the above example: pParagraph linked to a footnote supa id=fnref:1 href=#fn:1 rel=footnote1/a/sup. /p pSome other paragraph/p div class=footnotes hr / ol li id=fn:1 pThis is the footnote content. a href=#fnref:1 rev=footnote↩/a /p /li /ol /div This provides a trivial way to style footnotes as footnote, it'll even looks good unstyled and is completely backward compatible. Indeed. +1 on this general idea -1 on the precise markup, in particular the divol structure for the list of notes (this should be a new element, if possible) and the use of sup. It would also be nice to reduce some of the excess baggage on the a element, if possible. Before defining a markup for footnotes or sidenotes, I think it'd be a good idea to see what goals the syntax should fulfill. Is backward compatibility one of them, or should we always rely on the browser capabilities to relocate footnotes where they should be, or should we allow both? Both. For example in paged media the footnote should typically be placed at the end of the current page, whereas on-screen, the end of the section is usually more appropriate. * Footnotes should probably not be allowed to escape their enclosing article element. For instance, if you have a couple of weblog articles on your main page, each article having some footnotes, it'd probably not be a good idea to have footnotes from all articles mixed together in the same list. Yes, the positioning and counters should be tied to the enclosing sectional element. * Although not necessarily very common, some people like to put multiple paragraphs, lists, and some other block-level elements in footnotes and sidenotes (more often seen in sidenotes in books). I think it'd be a good idea to allow that in the markup. +1 -- Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end? -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
I came across an article by Jesper Tverskov titled The benefits of footnotes in webpages. (http://www.smackthemouse.com/footnotes) It may be of interest. Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail (http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/)
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes
Sander Tekelenburg wrote: At 20:35 -0800 UTC, on 2006-10-31, Jonathan Worent wrote: I came across an article by Jesper Tverskov titled The benefits of footnotes in webpages. (http://www.smackthemouse.com/footnotes) It may be of interest. IMO the problems with the title attribute he lists are in fact browser implementation poverty, not title attribute problems. Same for his arguments for footnotes. That's true, but they are all real world, practical problems which still haven't been solved in the past 10 years and there's no evidence to suggest that the situation will change any time soon. -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/
