Footnotes
I got my first negative comment on my use of footnotes from a reader who says :
I enjoy reading your posts at TMM, but –arrrgh!– your use of
footnotes is very irritating, especially in a hypertext medium.
Scrolling up and down, up and down, for your parenthetical asides is
very annoying.
Since this is hypertext, I’m thinking there may be a more HTML friendly solution to all this. Part of me would love to take the Suck.com route, but I can’t draw for shit and the template doesn’t have the room for side notes.
So here’s a little experiment I’m gonna try. Using CSS, I’m gonna see if I can make the footnotes appear by hovering over the number, using this sample paragraph from a post I did last week :
I’ve received plenty of letters and comments along these lines in response to the religious posts I’ve done in the past and it leads me to this question : Are you also saying those things to your fellow Christians or just smartass atheists like me[1]I’m describing myself here, not accusing anyone of labeling me as such. who to like to take cheap shots at the religious wrong? I’m grateful that there are Christians who are willing to fight the stereotype that conservative fundamentalists represent all of Christianity, but correcting misconceptions is only one piece of the puzzle[2]But it’s an important piece. I often try to be sensitive to these sorts of things, which is why I make an effort to never use the word “Christianity” when referring to the extreme-right without qualifying it with terms like “conservative”, “fundamentalist”, or “lunatic”.. As Bruce Bawer explains in his excellent book “Stealing Jesus”[3]You can read an excerpt of the book here., Christians need to reclaim their religion from the radical right.
I don’t think this works in IE, but it should work everywhere else. Because it wouldn’t work everywhere and the fact that the footnote doesn’t float long enough to click on links within the footnotes, I’d probably only incorporate something like this in addition to the notes that currently appear at the end of some posts. Are you able to see the footnotes by hovering over the number? Is the footnote floating over the text or is it offsetting everything? Is the floating footnote intuitive enough or is it just a waste of time?
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Yeah, doesn’t work in IE. I don’t mind the status quo though.
Comment by Arun — May 24, 2005 @ 1:55 pm
Works like a charm in Netscape 7.02 (Win); notes float above the text, no offsetting. It doesn’t work at all in IE 6.0.2 (Win); the cursor turns into a cross or plus sign when placed over the number, and no note appears at all.
This should have a simple fix than the one you’re using, I think. For similar notes in my blogroll, I just include title=”text goes here” in each entry’s hyperlink. It seems to work in all modern browsers. Visit my blog and check out the page source to see what I mean.
Comment by Waveflux — May 24, 2005 @ 1:57 pm
PS – You’d want line breaks, though. I’m not sure if “title” would allow that.
Comment by Waveflux — May 24, 2005 @ 2:00 pm
Does CSS work with IE? I don’t think it does. But this looks beautiful in firefox. Great job.
Comment by Andy — May 24, 2005 @ 2:05 pm
It doesn’t work for me but I live in Oklahoma and we really love Jesus here.
Comment by Becky — May 24, 2005 @ 2:13 pm
Some CSS works in IE. Most of CSS 1.0, some of CSS 2.0, and almost none of CSS 3.0. The other browsers are all much better. Unfortunately, MS has stated that they have no desire to improve their CSS support in future versions.
The solution is… use mozilla, firefox, netscape, opera, konqueror, or safari; depending on your platform of course.
Comment by Andrew — May 24, 2005 @ 2:14 pm
Works with firefox on linux, but the comment blocks don’t appear under the cursor, making it impossible to get to the embedded link.
I agree that the footnotes don’t work well with HTML.
Comment by mrf — May 24, 2005 @ 2:17 pm
Looks perfect in my Firefox.
Comment by Dave H — May 24, 2005 @ 2:23 pm
Looks good in firefox, shows up as superscripted text right inline with the main text in the (I think) RSS 2.0 feed.
Comment by Ryan Bayne — May 24, 2005 @ 2:42 pm
It does not work in my primary browser, Safari 1.0.3. But that version is non-CSS compliant in other ways. Looks fine in Firefox, though.
Comment by folkbum — May 24, 2005 @ 2:57 pm
It works and looks good in Firefox on a mac, but I’ve gotta tell you that I prefer the footnotes. If a new user were to come across your site, how would he or she know that those supercripts had an additional function other than pointing you to a footnote? I could be wrong, but it just isn’t really intuitive whereas the footnote idiom is widely recognized.
Comment by E-Rock — May 24, 2005 @ 3:08 pm
works but sucks on safari, works ok on firefox. i like the current format and dislike anything that pops up like that immensely, so i may be a teeeensy bit biased
Comment by adithemopur — May 24, 2005 @ 3:23 pm
we at skippy international prefer the use of paranthetical phrases (which makes us look smarter than we are) for our snide remarks [ed. note: and with 4 different kinds of brackets available on the keyboard, as well as html formatting code, the possibilities are, while not endless, at least myriad], which is not only amusing (at least, to us) but totally without problem, except for one (as if in these days of awol’s presidency, a blog formatting question is comparable to any sort of trouble whatsoever), e.g. (whatever that means): often, we forget what we were writing about when we began the sentence (what?).
Comment by skippy — May 24, 2005 @ 7:32 pm
This has a very interesting effect in my RSS reader. Here’s how the footnoted excerpt looks when I view it in Bloglines in IE:
I’ve received plenty of letters and comments along these lines in response to the religious posts I’ve done in the past and it leads me to this question : Are you also saying those things to your fellow Christians or just smartass atheists like me[1]I’m describing myself here, not accusing anyone of labeling me as such. who to like to take cheap shots at the religious wrong? I’m grateful that there are Christians who are willing to fight the stereotype that conservative fundamentalists represent all of Christianity, but correcting misconceptions is only one piece of the puzzle[2]But it’s an important piece. I often try to be sensitive to these sorts of things, which is why I make an effort to never use the word “Christianity” when referring to the extreme-right without qualifying it with terms like “conservative”, “fundamentalist”, or “lunatic”.. As Bruce Bawer explains in his excellent book “Stealing Jesus”[3]You can read an excerpt of the book here., Christians need to reclaim their religion from the radical right.
Actually, that’s not a completely accurate rendition, since the footnotes are also superscripted in my view. It’s not unreadable, but it is a little weird.
Comment by Charles Kuffner — May 25, 2005 @ 6:26 am
Works like a charm for me in Safari. What’s funny is, I rarely even notice the footnotes as I’m reading. I get to the bottom and then scroll up to see where they were…
So, this doesn’t really help me unless I start noticing the notes as I go.
Pretty cool though.
Comment by Mr Furious — May 25, 2005 @ 6:48 am
Works in RSS feed via Thunderbird and nicely in Firefox…good idea.
Comment by Valerae — May 25, 2005 @ 10:51 am
Looks fine on my Firefox. I’m with skippy, though. I am a parenthetical aside addict (as anyone who has ever read what I write would surely know (and I even like double (and triple) parentheses)).
Comment by platosearwax — May 26, 2005 @ 2:07 am
Hey-I like footnotes, but I’m an academic and I’m used to them. Footnotes are either good or bad depending upon their content–and the relative laziness of the reader. Yours are good-keep up the regular footnotes, and the lazy readers will have to adjust. Reading is not a passive state–it is and should be interactive.
Comment by Beth — May 26, 2005 @ 6:39 am