Re: asterisks and footnotes

If these are in fact glossary references (it sounds like it) then a link is a
good idea.Especially if that is made clear by including the attribute
rel="glossary" in the link.

a link is fairly low cost, and is explicit, and works everywhere. If you add
some type nformation to it viarel you can do cool stuff, whereas with an
asterisk or similar there is no explicit encoding. This is about getting the
semantics explicit so that even computeres can follow them...

Cheers

Charles

On Wed, 16 May 2001, Marjolein Katsma wrote:

  Iris,

  I think an asterisk is good only when you have a single (foot)note on a page. When you have more than one, I'd suggest you number them, or use symbolic names as the W3C does in its standards. It would probably also help to link the footnotes back to their references. I'd put the notes themselves simply at the bottom of the page then - unless the explanation is *very* short. A list of notes can itself be interesting to read and warrant a link from a table of contents on the page.

  At 04:49 2001-05-16 -0700, iris wrote:
  >hi everyone
  >
  >i'm just marking up a document with several occurences of asterisks after
  >words in data table cells which lead to a brief explanation or additional
  >info that couldn't fit into the data cell but is placed underneath the table
  >(a footnote basically).  i was wondering how to make that accessible.
  >
  >should i put an abbr or acronym tag  or span/title around the asterisk and
  >put the explanantion in there?  what if the explanation is really long,
  >won't that be confusing.  also, it would be repetitive, since the user would
  >then come across it twice, because it's still underneath the table for the
  >sighted users.  it would basically get read out twice by a screenreader.
  >
  >with references at the bottom of documents i normally link to the reference
  >and then from there back to the text, but that seems a bit overkill here.
  >and confusing again.
  >
  >or maybe i should put title="additional info after table" in a tag around
  >it.
  >
  >what would be the best and least confusing solution?
  >
  >thanks
  >iris
  >
  >the page in question is at http://www.demos.ac.uk/project/docs/0103.html
  >i'm not finished marking it up yet.
  >the data tables are further down the page (in grey).
  >
  >
  >
  >
  >
  >
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Received on Wednesday, 16 May 2001 10:39:15 UTC