Re: Footnotes

On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, Jason White wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Jul 1997, Dave Raggett wrote:
> 
> > Numbering is being worked on by the CSS & Formatting Properties
> > working group. I don't think they are considering foot notes
> > though.
> 
> The problem of notes in general (whether they be side notes, footnotes or
> end notes) is both a markup issue and a style problem. There should be a
> mechanism by which one can indicate the presence of a note and leave such
> formatting details as the note marker (whether it be a number, an asterisk
> or another character) and the positioning of the text of the note to be
> controlled by style properties. I have not been able to find any element
> for indicating the presence of a note in the "element index" of the HTML
> 4.0 draft. Perhaps one could use an empty anchor element for this purpose,
> although this is obviously not an elegant solution:
> <a name=txt1 href="#fn1" class="footnote"> </a> (and the style properties
> would have to insert the note number into the text at that point).

HTML 3.0 included a NOTE element for this, but this feature wasn't
considered sufficiently valuable by vendors. One possibility within
the scope for HTML 4.0 is to subclass a DIV or P element and then
to use style sheets to determine the placement of the element's
content. You can also mark the relationship between a source anchor
and the DIV or P element using the REL attribute, e.g.

  <A REL=footnote HREF="#fn2">...</A>

  ...

  <DIV class=footnote>
  ...

  </DIV>

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2521 (office) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)