Re: Marking-up and styling footnotes

Andy Mabbett wrote:

Any suggestions for better ways to mark up and style the footnotes and
especially the references to them (currently and temporarily styled
in-line), in:

http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/blithfield/plants20060815.htm

would be appreciated.

(as would other constructive comments)

Thank you.

From a design standpoint, I see nothing wrong with the way you did the
footnotes. This is clearly appropriate if accessibility to the
handicapped is of concern.

Some might want to bracket a defined term with <span title="abc"> and
</span>, where abc is the definition. This throws up a tooltip with the
definition when the cursor hovers over the bracketed term. I find this
annoying. Also, many viewers might not realize they should hover their
cursor over the term.

I'm not consistent in how I do footnotes among unrelated Web pages. In
some cases, I do it as you do. In other cases, I merely make the
footnoted term a link to the footnote, omitting the index. The latter
reflects the hyperlink nature of the Web.

--

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

Concerned about someone (e.g., Pres. Bush) snooping
into your E-mail? Use PGP.
See my <http://www.rossde.com/PGP/>

David E. Ross <nobody (AT) nowhere (DOT) not> scripsit:

http://www.westmidlandbirdclub.com/blithfield/plants20060815.htm
- -
From a design standpoint, I see nothing wrong with the way you did the
footnotes.

It's not bad, but it could be better.

First, the page contains asterisks "*" as if they were footnote references.
I cannot figure out what they mean.

Second, the references are out of the right context:

"Ranunculus aquatilis s.l. (a Water-crowfoot [1]), R. aquatilis s.s. (Common
Water-crowfoot - in SK02R [2]),"

Yet [1] and [2] relate to the abbreviations "s.l." and "s.s.", not to the
common name and the cryptic abbreviation "SK02R".

(By the way, shouldn't "s.l." and "s.s." appear in upright, non-italic
style? They are not part of the scientific name but annotation-like.)

(I award 42 bonus points for _not_ using the mostly confusing <abbr> markup,
even though it would theoretically be appropriate for "s.l." and "s.s.".)

Third, there is no back reference from the footnotes to the references. Back
references are not necessary but could be useful.

More notes on footnotes and endnotes:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/fn.html

Some might want to bracket a defined term with <span title="abc"> and
/span>, where abc is the definition.

Such an approach alone is surely not sufficient. But one might consider
using a title attribute in an <a href ...> element as an extra comfort, so
that many users would not need to follow the link at all. This however is
somewhat debatable.

I'm not consistent in how I do footnotes among unrelated Web pages. In
some cases, I do it as you do. In other cases, I merely make the
footnoted term a link to the footnote, omitting the index. The latter
reflects the hyperlink nature of the Web.

That's debatable too. If you write <a href="...">s.l.</a>, how will the user
know that the link just refers to a definition, so that if knows what "s.l."
means he can ignore the link? I'm afraid there is no good solution; the HTML
link concept is rather simple, even simplistic: a link is a link is a link.
Seeing a link, you never know what it really means and points to. Footnote
references like [1] look boring and dry, but people who have read some
science stuff know the idea: such references point to something that you
should normally ignore on first reading.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 19:31:22 +0200, David E. Ross <nobody (AT) nowhere (DOT) not>
wrote:

I'm not consistent in how I do footnotes among unrelated Web pages. In
some cases, I do it as you do. In other cases, I merely make the
footnoted term a link to the footnote, omitting the index. The latter
reflects the hyperlink nature of the Web.

True. But seeing a footnote as a number between brackets, or as a
superscript number or symbol, gives the reader a hint that this is some
further information on the previous term or sentence, probably at the
bottom of the page, whereas they have no clue where a hyperlink might lead
them. The difference is especially clear in Wikipedia articles: a
hyperlink leads to another lemma, a [2] leads to a footnote referencing a
source or giving some detail that would be out of place in the running
text.

Another advantage of the brackets system is that it prints nicely.

I think this is one of the areas where the hyperlink nature of the web can
be reflected quite nicely by using hyperlinks, but we are too much used to
the traditional presentation.

--
Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd