Re: footnote element in HTML

Hi Liam,

I'm sorry that you find the annotation spec FPWD very complex.  Any
feedback as to the nature of that complexity would be greatly appreciated
so we can assess how to address it in future versions.

While we're addressing requirements, how about:

* Ability to mark a section of text as the anchor, rather than just a
marker at a single point.
* Ability to have a footnote refer to multiple sections of the text, rather
than only one.
* Ability to provide alternate representations of the footnote comment,
rather than just language translations (for example audience, reading age,
authorization, etc are all issues here)
* The ability to refer to the footnote itself, for example to (you know)
comment on it.
* The ability to create footnotes with reference to non text, including
bounding boxes in image based media.
* Footnote content as media (image, audio, video) rather than plain text
* Ability to provide style information regarding the anchor rendering, for
example to ensure that a highlight color does not collide with the color of
the background, or the bounding box color does not collide with the color
of the image.
* Machine readable provenance information regarding the creator of the
footnote, separate from the document. Is it from the publisher, the author,
or some other party?  Machine readable to enable filtering.
* Ability to control the presentation of the footnote with javascript
and/or user-agent preferences.

Perhaps those aren't all requirements for the simple translation from print
footnotes to a digital facsimile but haven't we gotten past that by now?

Rob


On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 1:53 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:

> 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/
>
>


-- 
Rob Sanderson
Information Standards Advocate
Digital Library Systems and Services
Stanford, CA 94305