- From: Sander Tekelenburg <tekelenb@euronet.nl>
- Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 20:03:18 +0100
At 17:53 +0100 UTC, on 2006-10-31, H?kon Wium Lie wrote: [...] > W3C recently published a proposal on how to achieve > footnote/endnote presentations using the same markup [1]. The proposal > is quite simple. Given this markup: > > <div class=note>..</div> > > you would achieve footnoes with: > > .note { position: footnote } > > ane endnotes with: > > .note { position: endnote } I miss the semantic aspect. <div class=note> has no meaning. Something like <annotation> would have. Once that's in place, I suppose you could indeed offer CSS mechanisms to suggest a presentation as footnote, endnote, whatever. Btw, I can perhaps vaguely imagine what display:footnote might look like, but I have no clue what position:footnote might look like. I feel that this sort of thing needs to be *much* more obvious from a spec, or else only a minute elite will actually use such features (which in turn will give browser vendors a reason to not even bother implementing support). Another problem I have when thinking about the ideal spec for this is that footnote seems to me very much a print concept, where you have a clear concept of "page". With a screen presentation however, there's the question whether end of page == end of document, or whether it is the end of the window (and scrolling takes you to the next 'page'). I mention this because I can imagine that in some situations you'd want notes to appear at the end of the document, but in other situations it might work better to have them at the bottom of the window, or at the end of a chapter/section, which doesn't necessarily equal the end of the document. Also, given the realities of scrolling, I think a useful implementation would require a mechanism that allows the user to navigate back from the footnote to the point in the text that references it. I'm not sure what mark-up this would require though, especially given that a footnote might be referenced to from different points of the text. Possibly an anchor-like mechanism would be simplest, as it would allow a UA to allow the user to simply hit the back button. (Althought that assumes the UA would go back to the specific point in the page where the user was before -- some UAs instead still go back to the top of that page.) Another thought: it seems to me that something along the lines of the longdesc attribute[*] might be useful for annotational purposes. The only implementation I'm aware of is iCab's, which provides access to it through its contxtual menu and loads the expanded description in a new window. That too makes it easy for users to return to where they were. The downside of longdesc of course is that it requires a separate Web page, which would exclude the possibility of presentating the annotation in the same page. Perhaps an longdesc-like annotation element should therefore require an anchor (pointing to an ID within the current page), not allow URLs that point to external documents. [*] <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/objects.html#adef-longdesc-IMG> -- Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>
Received on Saturday, 4 November 2006 11:03:18 UTC