Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 20:30:44 +0600, James Graham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
<p>Some text <span class="sidenote">this 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.
Which won't work in the absence of CSS or javascript - not unprecedented in the
spec but surely a disadvantage. How well will this markup work in an existing
screenreader?
Indeed. +1 on this general idea -1 on the precise markup, in particular the
<div><ol> 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.
Indeed. I think HTML would benefit from some general solution for providing
numbered references (indeed, I brought this up before), not just for footnotes
but also for e.g. sections, elements in lists, bibliographies, etc. One can
imagine simple markup like
<ref to="idref">fallback content</ref>
but I think there are issues with parsing documents containing such references.
--
"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"
-- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
