Re: [css-gcpm] Footnotes as Regions

Hey!


On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com> wrote:
...

>
> C. The interaction between footnotes and columns is complex. In
> particular, how would you specify that a footnote be displayed at the
> bottom of the column that contains the reference?
>
> D. Footnotes are sometimes displayed inline to save space. The document
> author could easily do this by setting the display value on the footnote,
> but in some cases we'd like the user agent to set short footnotes inline,
> and longer footnotes as blocks.
>
> span.footnote {
> flow-into: footnote;
> bikeshed-display: compact;
> }
>

 Yes, these are some vary good points. There are several ways footnotes can
be displayed -- they may be displayed at the bottom of each column, or at
the bottom of the page spanning all the present columns.

Also there may either be a certain space at the bottom that is reserved for
footnote display, or the space occupied by footnotes may "eat into" the
space used by the normal text flow. In the second case, one needs to have
some somewhat complicated logic as the placement of the footnote at the
bottom of the page may mean that the reference to the footnote flows on to
the next page. If one then moves the footnote to that next page, the
reference will likely move back to the previous page. When I programmed
pagination.js I solved this part of the problem by putting a vertical space
at the bottom of the first page that had the same height as the footnote.

But what about even more complex problems such as several footnotes places
right after oneanother and the contents of the footnote being so large that
not all the footnotes can fit on the same page?

I don't think that all this should be directly taken care of by the
browser. But it would be good if more complex problems such as these could
be solved through CSS/Javascript and that what is available to the
webdeveloper isn't too constraining.



-- 
Johannes Wilm
Fidus Writer
http://www.fiduswriter.org