Re: Footnotes in HTML5.1

David MacDonald <david100@sympatico.ca>, 2014-08-07 15:56 -0400:
...
> I think it would be great to have a working <noteref> and <note> elements
> that opens (and/or jumps) to the footnote and returns the user back to
> footnote.

You might want to consider taking this topic to the www-style list instead.

The reason I'd suggest www-style is that the idea of having specific markup
for footnotes is not a new suggestion -- we've had a lot of discussion over
the years about markup for footnotes, and that discussion was a large part
of what led to the <aside> element being added to HTML.

So the fact that at this point we don't have a more specific element than
<aside> for footnotes is actually not an oversight -- it's by design.

That is, the <aside> element is, by design, a presentation-agnostic means
intended for marking up all types of notes as a general class. As far as
footnotes specifically, the prevailing agreement that emerged from past
discussions was that footnotes are mostly just a particular presentational
way to handle (render) notes as a class (<aside>s) in particular
presentational environments -- and so therefore the right solution for
footnotes is for CSS to provide some means to handle them.

That's why the CSS Generated Content for Paged Media (GCPM) spec has an
extensive overview of footnote handling, and a solution:

  aside.fn { float: footnote }
  http://www.w3.org/TR/css-gcpm-3/#creating-footnotes

All that said, as far as I know, that "footnote" value for the float
property isn't actually supported by any browsers yet -- though there is
already at least one non-browser tool that supports it, Prince:

  http://www.princexml.com/doc/footnotes/

Anyway, that's all why I'd suggest www-style as the best place to restart
any new discussion about handling of footnotes -- e.g., to ask why browsers
haven't already implemented "float: footnote" yet and/or to find out if there's
some proposed CSS alternative to "float: footnote" that's been discussed
and that browser implementors might be more likely to implement at this point.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike