Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, end notes, side notes
Although providing the footnote as a tool-tip seems appealing at the first glance, it is not exactly how it should be done. Footnotes are commonly used for bibliographic references; using the title attribute seems to be a non-solution in this case. Text of such footnotes cannot be copied and they cannot contain hyperlinks. Chris -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ian Hickson Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 2:19 PM To: WHATWG List Subject: Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, end notes, side notes On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Martin Atkins wrote: It seems to be that the visual continuous media equivalent of a footnote is something like a tooltip or pop-up box containing some text. It'd only be displayed when the user requests it, by clicking on or hovering over it. Paper documents permanently display the footnotes only because of the limitations of the media. Doing click-to-view footnotes with current CSS is tricky, but doing hover-to-view is reasonably straightforward using some trickery with the :hover pseudo-class and display:none, as long as the footnote content is inline. Reverting to traditional footnotes for print media based on the same markup is not straightforward, however. The CSS3 support for shuffling elements about would do it, but we're not there yet. I think the CSS stuff is less of a big deal than you make it out to be, but I agree in general with those comments. On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Michael(tm) Smith wrote: Whatever browser implementation poverty there might be in handling of the title attribute, the fundamental deficiency is that basing a mechanism for displaying annotations on an attribute value limits the content of the annotations to text. Annotations that can't even contain simple character formatting are useless for anything except the simplest purposes. All good points. 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. Wouldn't it? When an author cannot got hold of a work herself, she must sometimes cite a citation of that work in second work. This is what the abbreviation cit. is for. And sometimes a citation refers to more than one version of a work. Here's an example out of the Oxford Style Guide: J. D. Denniston, /The Greek Particles/ (Oxford, 1934; citations are from the 2nd edn., 1954). Without more clarity (and that partly means examples) on how cite / should apply to the complexity of real academic citations, I'd avoid making the assumption that cite / cannot contain cite / -- for now. cite is now defined to mean title of work.
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, end notes, side notes
Le 2008-04-21 à 8:19, Ian Hickson a écrit : On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Michel Fortin wrote: Interesting. If I understand well, this CSS proposal would allow a note inserted in the middle of a paragraph to become a footnote. For instance this: pThis paragraph has a footnotefootnoteThis is a footnote/ footnote./p could be presented like this (where 1 is presumably superscript and linked to the footnote): This paragraph has a footnote1. __ 1. This is a footnote. That'd very interesting. But the markup is poor for backward compatibility and makes it difficult to include more than one paragraph in a note. So I'm going to propose an improvement to this markup. (For the next example: fn = footnote; fnref = footnote reference.) What is needed to solve the backward compatibility problem is a second way of indirection, so that the footnote can be placed elsewhere. This is the first piece of the puzzle: pThis paragraph has a footnotefnref for=my-footnote/ fnref./p fn id=my-footnote pThis footnote can contain block-level elements!/p /fn In this example, a reference to the footnote is found in the paragraph, and the footnote content is elsewhere in the document. The browser would be in charge of numbering the marker correctly (or not, if the stylesheet says so) and to put the referenced footnote in a list with the other footnotes in the order they are reference. Notice the empty content of fnref? That's substitution content for backward compatibility: if you put a link to the footnote within the fnref element, when displaying things as footnote the actual content is substituted by the marker, but footnote-unaware browsers will show the link. In the previous case, the fallback content for the reference marker could have been: supa href=#my-footnote1/a/sup Since footnotes are referenced and reordered, you're free to place them wherever you want. If you care about backward compatibility, you should put them all together at the end of your article and there you have your list of footnotes. Footnotes without reference are considered to be referenced from where they are in the source. Or if you want them to be styled as sidenotes, just put the notes before or after the paragraph they relate to in the source, or even inline inside paragraphs (although inline footnotes should be restricted to inline content), and hide the marker. The last piece of the backward compatibility puzzle is the fnl (footnote list) element. This element is optional, but if present, preceding footnotes inside the same sectioning element will be relocated inside this element. fnl would be styled as an ordered list, and its list items would be footnote elements (fn). 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 suggest that footnotes be relocated at the end of the first article element, or to the first fnl element following them in the source. It goes without saying that footnotes already inside fnl stay where they are, although they should be reordered in the order they are referred to in the text. At this point, why not simplify the markup and remove the fnref? And turn the fnl and fn into a section and some divs or something and you have backwards compatible markup that already does everything we need without sacrificing any of the stylability... The idea of relocating the content is that one may specify in some form from a stylesheet how the notes should be rendered -- sidenotes, footnotes, endnotes would all use the same markup with a different style. (By relocating I mean it should appear somewhere else in the rendering three, not moved to another element in the DOM by the way.) The reason I came with this somewhat complex proposal is to satisfy the following cases which cannot be completely fulfilled with current markup: 1. Permitting notes as actual footnotes (not endnotes) for paged media: given some styling, the browser relocates footnotes at the end of each page. 2. Permitting notes with any content -- paragraphs, lists, code blocks (precode), etc. -- to degrade gracefully as endnotes, or sidenotes (given proper styling and placement in the source), in current browsers. 3. Permitting footnotes to be placed near the context they're referenced from when you don't care about backward compatibility (easier editing). 4. Permitting footnotes to be rendered incrementally on paged media when the content is defined before the marker (or almost-incremental if the content of a footnote immediately follows the paragraph with its marker). That said, I certainly acknowledge the argument that the feature may not be compelling enough for implementors to bother with a proposal of this complexity, and it is possible
Re: [whatwg] Footnotes, end notes, side notes
I haven't added any new markup for footnotes or end notes. Side notes without callouts in the main flow are possible with aside. For footnotes and end notes there have been a number of proposals, such as the following (and variants on them): text text footnote note note /footnote text text text text a href=#fn1 target=footnote1/a text text footnote id=fn1 note note /footnote text text a href=#fn1 rel=footnote1/a text text div id=fn1 note note /div text text fn xref=fn1/ text text footnote id=fn1 note note /footnote text text ref to=fn1fallback text text footnote id=fn1 note note /footnote None of these are really compelling, in my opinion. None have the awesome factor that really makes it likely that UAs will ever implement them well. None are especially compellingly better than the currently available options: span title=note notetext tex text text/span ptext text/p aside note note /aside ptext text/p text text a href=#fn1 id=r1 class=footnote1/a text text div id=fn1a href=#r1uarr;/a note note /div I have added a section showing examples of how to use these. Having said that, here are more detailed comments in response to the feedback provided: On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Michel Fortin wrote: 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 With aside, you can do this, though not directly in a paragraph. If you use more markup, you can make this work today with fallback: pSome text span class=sidenotespan(/spanthis is a sidenote to put in the marginspan)/span/span and some other text./p It might require some tweaking, but you get the idea. 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. You could do this with aside: pParagraph linked to a footnotea href=#fn1 id=r1[1]/a./p aside id=fn1a href=#r1[1]/a: This is the footnote content./aside pSome other paragraph./p 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. (Though I might quibble on the precise structure.) 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 seem good. 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. Makes sense. You'd want footnotes scoped to article, and end notes scoped to the
