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="reference"><a style="" href="#_note-0"
title="">[1]</a></sup>
<ol class="references">
<li id="_note-0"><b><a href="#_ref-0" title="">^</a></b> <cite
class="book" style="font-style: normal;">Raggett, Dave (1998). <i><a
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:Booksources&isbn=0201178052"
class="internal">ISBN 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=issue>This section on the
<code><a href="#tabindex0">tabindex</a></code> attribute needs to be
checked for backwards-compatibility.
<span class=issue>We 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/
