Footnote style

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Re: Footnote style

Stan Brown wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 03:53:45 GMT in
> comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html, Beauregard T. Shagnasty favored
> us with...[color=green]
>> Yes, that is bad. Use CSS.[/color]
>
> Why is <small> not deprecated, I wonder?[/color]

I wonder that myself...

--
-bts
-When motorcycling, never follow a pig truck

[Alan J. Flavell]

Re: Footnote style

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Stan Brown wrote:
[color=blue]
> Why is <small> not deprecated, I wonder?[/color]

It is indeed a strange oversight that HTML has no
de-emphasis markup as such, and we have to make do
with something overtly presentational instead.

[Nick Kew]

Re: Footnote style

James A. Donald wrote:
[color=blue]
> So you are arguing that when a book is adapted to this medium,
> footnotes should become links.[/color]

A link, certainly.
[color=blue]
> And if the user wants to see a link in
> context, he (not I) should pop it up.[/color]

"pop it up"?

There are a number of ways to present such notes. A couple I've
used are (a long time ago - in a long-outdated article)
http://www.webthing.com/tutorials/login.html and (more recently)
the margin-notes implementation in the articles at
http://www.apachetutor.org/ . Feel free to use any of those
techniques you think appropriate.

--
Nick Kew

[Matt Silberstein]

Re: Footnote style

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 16:20:17 +0100, in
comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html , "Alan J. Flavell"
<flavell@ph.gla .ac.uk> in
<Pine.LNX.4.62. 0509261609210.4 024@ppepc56.ph. gla.ac.uk> wrote:
[color=blue]
>On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, James A. Donald wrote:
>[color=green]
>> So you are arguing that when a book is adapted to this medium,
>> footnotes should become links. And if the user wants to see a link
>> in context, he (not I) should pop it up.[/color]
>
>This may be a difference between marginal notes, and footnotes in the
>strict sense of the term. Some books have both. Some books even have
>three categories - marginal notes, notes at the foot of each page, and
>supplementar y notes at the back (not including the literature
>references! Four?).[/color]

ISTM that footnotes et. al. are an attempt to make a static medium
hypertexted. This is what web pages were set up to deal with and is
exactly the kind of thing you change when putting paper material on
the web Questions of small font or italic entirely miss the point.
Those little numbers are links to other information, they should be
hypertext links.
[color=blue]
>At least, with a decent web browser, the user has the option to open
>additional resources in a separate window or tab, at their discretion
>and convenience. I'm not keen on the author trying to second-guess
>how I'd want to browse, although I'm well aware of the regular chorus
>of "but, but, readers don't know how to use their browsers". Well, if
>that's what the chorus think, why aren't they helping their readers to
>learn?[/color]

Again, where the other information is opened is not the point, the
point is that you go from one set of info to the related set.

--
Matt Silberstein

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[James A. Donald]

Re: Footnote style

--
James A. Donald wrote:[color=blue][color=green]
> > So you are arguing that when a book is adapted to
> > this medium, footnotes should become links. And if
> > the user wants to see a link in context, he (not I)
> > should pop it up.[/color][/color]

Constantinople:[color=blue]
> You could combine two solutions (compare blogs, with
> recent articles on the front page but also accessible
> by "permalink" ).
>
> As far as one system goes, my favorite as a reader is
> to put everything on one page, with links to anchors.
> This will not work if the document is so long that
> just rendering it takes a long time. This makes the
> document easily downloadable, easily printable.[/color]

This is a long document, so has to be translated to a
tree with the leaves of the tree in a doubly linked
list, hence not easily downloadable or printable.

I am coming to the view that the document should be
divided into natural units, each a fair bit longer than
a single screenful of html, with footnotes etc on the
bottom of these natural units in slightly smaller print,
as if they were pages and footnotes in the original
(though they will each correspond to roughly two or
three pages of original printed text on average) with
clickable links that move you to the footnote, or back
from the footnote to the text. Since the original is a
classic, it is worth staying as faithful to the original
as is reasonable in a new and different medium.

This however means that many of these natural units will
have several footnotes, which is bad, while the original
exercised great care to ration footnotes to one per
page. Perhaps this is more acceptable when footnote
backlinks are enabled.

--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3Tdzcl VpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Y1KIMDPY2VBfRfr vvU+lBK9RUZ5nz+ 0jyh+Gi+LU
4en5qcVl+feyduh bgn5BrzF5vLpayV GzMCQuRGhAW


--

http://www.jim.com

[James A. Donald]

Re: Footnote style

"Alan J. Flavell"[color=blue]
> This may be a difference between marginal notes, and footnotes in the
> strict sense of the term. Some books have both. Some books even have
> three categories - marginal notes, notes at the foot of each page, and
> supplementary notes at the back (not including the literature
> references! Four?).
>
> At least, with a decent web browser, the user has the option to open
> additional resources in a separate window or tab, at their discretion
> and convenience.[/color]

I was proposing to convert footnotes into marginal notes.

Several people seem to be suggesting that I make them into
supplementary notes at the back, and provide a link that the user can
open.



--

http://www.jim.com

[James A. Donald]

Re: Footnote style

On 26 Sep 2005 09:10:56 -0700, "James Pickering" <jp29@cox.net > wrote:[color=blue][color=green]
> > This page illustrates the way I do it .....
> >
> > http://jp29.org/adc1938.htm
> >
> > ..... I do not worry about footnote (or gloss) text size when I write
> > for the Web.[/color]
>
> Here is another example page:
>
> http://jp29.org/blackhawk.htm[/color]

This seems a straightforward reproduction of the standard
printed matter approach - page with footnotes, rather
than an adaptation to a new medium.



--

http://www.jim.com

[boclair]

Re: Footnote style

James A. Donald wrote:[color=blue]
> --
> James A. Donald wrote:[/color]
[color=blue]
> This is a long document, so has to be translated to a
> tree with the leaves of the tree in a doubly linked
> list, hence not easily downloadable or printable.
>
> I am coming to the view that the document should be
> divided into natural units, each a fair bit longer than
> a single screenful of html, with footnotes etc on the
> bottom of these natural units in slightly smaller print,
> as if they were pages and footnotes in the original
> (though they will each correspond to roughly two or
> three pages of original printed text on average) with
> clickable links that move you to the footnote, or back
> from the footnote to the text. Since the original is a
> classic, it is worth staying as faithful to the original
> as is reasonable in a new and different medium.
>
> This however means that many of these natural units will
> have several footnotes, which is bad, while the original
> exercised great care to ration footnotes to one per
> page. Perhaps this is more acceptable when footnote
> backlinks are enabled.[/color]

We deal with this matter all the time, categorising such supplementary
and qualifying material as footnotes, endnotes and commentaries
(explanatory)

Whether the work is for print or screen, conceptually it is paged,
sectionised and chaptered.

If the reader of a printed work is directed to supplementary
information, he can rapidly cast his eye to the bottom of the page, or
bookmarked Section, Chapter and/or Work Endnote pages, holding his place
with his finger if necessary.

Web pages have a very different character.

Not only are they of indeterminate length depending on the Reader's
equipment but there seems no way to provide a foot with notes and
commentaries that can be positioned on the screen so that it not only
relates to the passage being read, but does not display superfluous
material.

If the notes or commentaries are placed as footers in a web page this
involves scrolling or linking to and back to the applicable note. Such
schema tends to be confusing and distracting to the Reader. It is less
easy for the reader to mark his place once there is movement of the body
of the text/table/graph

Broadly our practise is:

Place notes and commentaries into a database. (their collection,
management and updating being a major considerations also.)

Provide Section and Chapter Endnote web pages that are print friendly.

Enable the Reader, as he wishes, to activate a superscripted link
selecting the detail of the note or commentary and displaying it below
the passage; Notes and Commentaries can be differentiated by font and
background colors. (A major advantage that web pages have over printed
pages are that they are expandable. There is not the same constraint on
the length of the commentary.)

Provide on each web page a link to applicable Section and Chapter
Endnote web pages. All Notes and Commentaries are displayed in one or
other of the Endnote Pages. (Notes and Commentaries may not be unique to
a Section or Chapter Endnote page)

Louise

[David Ross]

Re: Footnote style

"James A. Donald" wrote:[color=blue]
>
> In a book, a footnote is presented at the bottom of the page, in a
> slightly smaller type.
>
> converting a book to html, pages are bottomless, so we can put the
> footnote in a separate link, or create a footnote div class that
> floats right.
>
> Links are probably what the author would have used had he been writing
> in html, but divs that float right are closer to the spirit of the
> original work, and enables the footnote to be seen in context, as was
> originally intended.
>
> Html does not have any equivalent of a slightly smaller font - to get
> a slightly smaller font we would have to specify the fonts of the main
> document and also the font of the footnote class, which is bad.
>
> How have other people solved this problem?[/color]

I am not really consistent in how I do this. Usually, I use
footnotes at the end of a section within a page; but other times, I
use endnotes at the bottom of the page.

Sometimes, I have a superscript as a link to the note (see the
table in my
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/PGP/pgp_keyserv.htm l#pubserv>); but
sometimes, I merely put the link on a key word or phrase (see first
line under "Solutions" in my
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/editorials/edtl_2ndamend.h tml>). This
latter is also used extensively for the Bible at
<URL:http://bible.ort.org/books/pentd2.asp>. With hyper-linking,
numbered footnotes or endnotes are not really necessary.

I use the following class to reduce the font size:
.ftnote { font-size: 85% }
Usually, this is on a paragraph: <p class=ftnote>. However, if I
have several notes, I use it on a division: <div class=ftnote> . .
.. </div> with paragraphs within it. Anyone having trouble reading
the small text usually knows how to make it larger.

I would strongly recommend placing the notes on a separate page.
This leads to launching a new window for those who don't used
tabbed browsing. Even launching a new tab unexpectedly can be
annoying. For pages that have very extensive notes, the user can
always choose to launch a new window or tab.

The most important thing to remember about footnotes and endnotes
is that the main text should be readable and understandable without
them. They merely add to the main text, often by providing
references to other texts. If they indeed refer to other texts
that are also Web pages, you might instead make the links to those
pages and omit the intervening notes.

--

David E. Ross
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/>

I use Mozilla as my Web browser because I want a browser that
complies with Web standards. See <URL:http://www.mozilla.org/>.

[mbstevens]

Re: Footnote style

James A. Donald wrote:[color=blue]
> On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 04:59:48 GMT, mbstevens
>[color=green]
>>Besides, the web itself is largely interlinked notes that
>>reference each other. What's important over here is just a
>>footnote to someone over there. Relativity of relevance rules.
>>You're denying visitors the ability to easily bookmark just the
>>footnote. You can use real footnotes, but it seems quaint and
>>outdated.[/color]
>
>
> So you are arguing that when a book is adapted to this medium,
> footnotes should become links. And if the user wants to see a link in
> context, he (not I) should pop it up.
>[/color]


The user's preferences of how her browser should work has a lot
to do with it.

I'm a tab guy. I may have several tabs of the same page I'm
reading across the top of my browser (and, I often work from the
Fluxbox window manager which tabs all kinds of otherwise diverse
content together).

Others like popups. They set their browser to open new content
in a new window, and just close the window when they're finished
with it. This is the default behavior in, e.g., the newest
Gnome desktop (to the chagrin of many).

Still others prefer to just replace the content in the present
window with the new content, and just use their back-arrow to
return.

But on the web, I think that the thing that works most flexibly
is to err on the side of lots of .html pages. This does not
limit the grouping of content. But it does allow all kinds of
visitors to have their lap dance sitting in their favorite
chair. A single page well linked internally will do, too. But
if it is a large page then the visitor may have to wait a long
while for an item at page bottom to load. This occasionally
irritates me about the w3c's website, although I can appreciate
their interest in having a single huge document file for ease of
upkeep. I'll take lots of pages, thank you very much.

[Stan Brown]

Re: Footnote style

> On 26 Sep 2005 09:10:56 -0700, "James Pickering" <jp29@cox.net > wrote:[color=blue][color=green]
> > Here is another example page:
> >
> > http://jp29.org/blackhawk.htm[/color][/color]

One data point, FWIW:

I found this page rather irritating -- there are little bracketed
numbers apparently intended to be footnotes, but when I click on them
nothing happens.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA

http://OakRoadSystems.com/

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Why We Won't Help You:

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[James Pickering]

Re: Footnote style

Stan Brown wrote:[color=blue][color=green]
> > On 26 Sep 2005 09:10:56 -0700, "James Pickering" <jp29@cox.net > wrote:[color=darkred]
> > > Here is another example page:
> > >
> > > http://jp29.org/blackhawk.htm[/color][/color]
>
> One data point, FWIW:
>
> I found this page rather irritating -- there are little bracketed
> numbers apparently intended to be footnotes, but when I click on them
> nothing happens.[/color]

Oops, wrong page loaded -- I have now loaded the one I intended:

http://jp29.org/blackhawk.htm

Thanks for the feedback.

James Pickering

[Dr John Stockton]

Re: Footnote style

JRS: In article <8fLZe.3823$oc. 2233@newsread2. news.pas.earthl ink.net>,
dated Mon, 26 Sep 2005 04:59:48, seen in news:comp.infos ystems.www.autho
ring.html, mbstevens <NOXwebmasterx@ xmbstevensx.com > posted :[color=blue]
>
>Footnotes can mostly be avoided on the web by giving each its
>own little .html file, linked to by the main exposition. No
>need to clutter the page. Let the _reader_ decide whether it
>will come up as a replacement page, a new tab, or a popup.[/color]

If the OP wishes to be considerate of those without a permanent Net
link, who may want to save pages for reading later, he would do well to
avoid links to separate documents for footnotes.

ISTM that footnotes, in <small> or using CSS, could well go at the end
of the present logical section; either a paragraph or the next size up.
Alternatively, in side-boxes.

End-of-chapter-grade notes might well go at end-of-page.

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon. co.uk Turnpike v4.00 IE 4 ©
<URL:http://www.jibbering.c om/faq/> JL/RC: FAQ of news:comp.lang. javascript
<URL:http://www.merlyn.demo n.co.uk/js-index.htm> jscr maths, dates, sources.
<URL:http://www.merlyn.demo n.co.uk/> TP/BP/Delphi/jscr/&c, FAQ items, links.

[James A. Donald]

Re: Footnote style

boclair[color=blue]
> Broadly our practise is:
>
> Place notes and commentaries into a database. (their collection,
> management and updating being a major considerations also.)
>
> Provide Section and Chapter Endnote web pages that are print friendly.
>
> Enable the Reader, as he wishes, to activate a superscripted link
> selecting the detail of the note or commentary and displaying it below
> the passage; Notes and Commentaries can be differentiated by font and
> background colors. (A major advantage that web pages have over printed
> pages are that they are expandable. There is not the same constraint on
> the length of the commentary.)
>
> Provide on each web page a link to applicable Section and Chapter
> Endnote web pages. All Notes and Commentaries are displayed in one or
> other of the Endnote Pages. (Notes and Commentaries may not be unique to
> a Section or Chapter Endnote page)[/color]

Unfortunately, you write in a dialect with which I am not familiar,
and your POV is unstable, sliding between the client side page seen by
the end reader, and the constructs such as database entries and
categories seen by the author. (End reader does not grasp the
difference between a note and a commentary)

If I follow you, you say that the footnotes should appear to the user
at the end of section, or in some similarly appropriate place so that
the document makes sense when printed, but when viewed on screen, the
reader should access footnotes by clicking on the link.



--

http://www.jim.com

[constantinopoli@gmail.com]

Re: Footnote style


James A. Donald wrote:[color=blue]
> In a book, a footnote is presented at the bottom of the page, in a
> slightly smaller type.[/color]

One thing I've appreciated lately is the way isohunt presents its info,
as hidden window-within-a-window that slides or folds open and shut in
place. It works well for me as a metaphor for uncovering detail and
practically as a way to avoid having to juggle multiple simultaneous
windows, to avoid obscuring the main material with a popup window, and
to access detail without jumping. Google mail does something similar
with its conversations, which I also like, expanding them in place. Of
course it may not work at all for notes and it may impose too many
restrictions on the user end, but I've liked that sort of thing where
I've seen it. (Google groups and mail quote folding is another example,
more useful with the "top posting" style common in email since it hides
context.)