[All] Policy on Footnotes

For one of the OEP notes, I recommended that most/all of the endnotes be
included in the text because they contained important information.  The
author felt that doing so would interrupt the flow too much.

This is a matter of personal style preference and there is a tradeoff. 

For readers who do NOT read notes, including them in the text can
interrupt the flow.
For readers that DO like to read notes, it is disruptive to have to flip
several pages forward to find the notes and then back to the text (I'm
in this group).

The guideline I was taught, and that I use is:
* Never use footnotes or endnotes unless there are really strong reasons
to do so. 
* Such reasons arise very infrequently, because: 
  - If it is important, then there is usually a good way to put it in
the text, 
  - If it is not important then it is usually better to just skip it. 

However I have seen plenty of documents that use other guidelines.

Questions to the group:
1. Are there any generally accepted guidelines on this for style? Or
just personal preferences?
2. Does the W3C or SWBPD WG have a position on this?
3. If not, should we?

Mike

Received on Wednesday, 25 May 2005 22:42:14 UTC