Footnotes

Has anyone developed a means of representing automatically numbered
footnotes in HTML? Currently, it is possible to represent footnotes using
anchors, as in:

[...] Text before footnote. <a name=txt1 href="#fn1"> [1] </a>
and at the end of the document:
<h2> Footnotes [really end notes] </h2>
<p>
<a name=fn1 href="#txt1"> [1] </a> Footnote text.
[...]

The disadvantage of this approach is that it requires the author of the
document to specify all of the footnote numbers explicitly, and to
renumber subsequent notes if a new note is inserted into the text. Also,
the footnotes appear as end notes rather than as actual footnotes.
Undoubtedly, authoring software could handle the renumbering if it were
designed to do so, but if the document is being typed directly into a text
editor or the authoring tool does not specifically support a convention
for representing footnotes such as that described above, then an
alternative means is necessary. This issue would presumably be of
importance in the ICADD work, given the intention to use HTML as the basis
for the production of academic and technical materials for people with
print disabilities. I have also noticed a substantial number of documents
on the web which make use of footnotes (anchors are used as in the above
example).

Has a better solution to this problem been proposed, and is there any
interest in developing one?

Received on Friday, 25 July 1997 21:10:18 UTC