Re: footnote element in HTML

On Mon, 9 Feb 2015 16:19:37 -0500
"Siegman, Tzviya - Hoboken" <tsiegman@wiley.com> wrote:
[...]
> From: David MacDonald [mailto:david100@sympatico.ca]

> Please forward this to the group...my email is not on the list apparently... thanks...
>

You have to be a participant in the digital publishing interest group, which is Member-only. If you are a participant and the list isn't working for you we can fix it :-)

> I think I need to take a step back and speak of the motivation to introduce a <note> element. From the perspective of the circle I travel in, web accessibility, we were looking for an elegant accessible, easy solution for johnny lunchbox web developers in academic environments etc. to create accessible endnotes and footnotes on their web sites. Currently, this can be done with anchors, but it isn't. But it IS done in MS Word documents, for the simple reason that it is easy, dedicated, elegant and accessible.

I want to second this. HTML - and XML - caught on (and are still used and are current, and not obsolete) in large part because they freed document creators from the tyranny of programming. You don't need to know long obscure words like "ontology", you can make a footnote with <footnote><m>†</m><p>....</p></footnote> -- or <fn> if you use a lot of them -- and an end note with <endnote>... and a margin-note with <marginnote>. You do this because as an author they are different things to you.

A good annotations spec will surely be able to lift such marked-up content out of a document and make use of it without requiring the author to learn abstractions such as complex annotations specs (and what I've seen so far looks very complex indeed, although it's early days yet).

The publishers I've worked with mostly use tools or hire consultants when stuff gets complex, so it seems to me the issues for dpub ought to be

(1)  necessary functionality;

(2)  clear division of various classes of footnote (and yes, I call them footnotes
     even if they are not at the bottom of the page, just as I can talk about a table
     of contents even if it's not formatted as a table, as indeed it
     usually isn't these days)

(3) simple to learn, deploy and use

(4) necessary functionality clearly includes
    . can be presented accessibly (research needed here);
    . translatable into other languages;
    . can contain markup (e.g. Japaese ruby, multiple paragraphs, tables...)
    . documents can be queried for markup in footnotes, e.g. to get
      a list of cited works
    . footnotes can be reused, appearing only once on a page even if referred to
      several times.

Do we have a list somewhere in a wiki of such needs?


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Monday, 9 February 2015 21:53:56 UTC