Re: Footnotes in HTML5.1

I was curious enough to follow the spec that you pointed out. It feels a
bit overkill, so I wondered what programmers in the real world have done to
implement the feature. Here's an interesting take: http://www.bigfootjs.com
suggesting overlays for footnotes, which feels a lot more webby than having
them at the bottom of the page. They could be made accessible, too. The
exact way in which bigfoot died it is, of course, not appropriate for
standardisation, but I thought it inspiring.

Just my 2c worth. Crawling back in my cave now...

Cheers,
Silvia.
 On 11 Aug 2014 00:26, "Michael[tm] Smith" <mike@w3.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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