Re: Proposal for XHTML 2.0: The <footnote> element

Christoph Päper wrote:
>
> A footnote in general does not contain more than one paragraph, thus I'd
> only allow the Text Module elements inside.

I'd have to agree with Philip. I've seen footnotes half a page
long and footnotes with several paragraphs.

> Ceterum censeo footnotes are to be used with paged media only. (In the
> traditional sense of "placed at the end of the page/document".)

I think footnotes and endnotes would both be useful in
online documents. Endnotes would, of course, go at the end
of the document. Footnotes would be placed at the end of
the section.

There's another complication with endnotes, however.
They're usually put in a section with a heading *before*
the bibliography, so even if such notes can be written
inline there should be a way to use linking instead of
inline text.

And futhermore! Several marks may refer to the same
footnote, so association by linking really is necessary.
See http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/footnoteref.html

The example in the CSS3 Lists module, by the way, is not
a footnote. It's just a regular note with cool formatting.
It may be wise to distinguish between notes that interrupt
the flow of the text and are pulled out (like footnotes)
and other types of notes--like tips, warnings, how not to
interpret the last paragraph, why marker-offset is missing,
etc.--that don't.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2003 13:08:19 UTC