New display value "footnote"

I'd like to propose a new value for the display property: "footnote".

Note: There's currently no element, neither plans for one, in HTML
      requiring such behaviour as described below, but there might
      be XML based languages that do.

Conforming user agents may treat display:footnote; the same like the
default, i.e. display:inline;, and should do so at least for media="screen".
Especially for paged media, all elements with this display value should be
collected in one common place preceded by unique identifiers like e.g.
ongoing numbers. A matching textual reference must be inserted in their
initial positions then.
If the element in question is kept in position, UAs may surround the element
by brackets or dashs, or denote it as additional information otherwise
according to lang().

There might be need for an additional property defining whether footnotes
are to be placed at the end of the very page or at the end of the whole
document or should stay in their initial positions:

  footnote-placement: *auto* | page | document | stay;

---

I'd also like to remind you of the fault that there's currently no
possibility to overwrite CSS properties based on their value defined by the
author style sheet. Some want to code something like

  *[@position:fixed] {position: absolute !important}
  /* IIRC attributes cannot start with the at-sign in XML,
   * neither do CSS properties, but selectors. */

to disable fixed positioning.
There'll be, I assume, also people who'd like to overwrite display:footnote;
by display:inline;. This would of course be a non-issue with

  * {footnote-placement: stay !important;}

Christoph Päper

Received on Wednesday, 18 September 2002 14:03:00 UTC