Usability of Footnotes
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
> As an author, I want to add more details which don’t fit in the main body of the text. Because I hate deleting text and my editor told me to take it out.
I joked about IJ doing that exact thing, that the editor was all “no, you can’t just list nonsensical film titles for four straight pages” and DFW said “watch this.”
Of course it’s us poor readers that pay the price having to use two bookmarks (or three, as some footnotes have footnotes). And there was plenty of this:
> the user is forced to break from the flow of reading
I’ve never had to reread so many passages. If you take it all in stride it’s quite fun, really. I found it humorous and chuckled each time I had to skip to the back, like I was privy to an inside joke.
The article does raise good points, and I’ve never used an e-reader. I bet it helps a ton, I imagine something like the pop up doc/diff/def viewers like in a modern source code editor. I imagine it would’ve taken away some of the fun from IJ, but of course that’s not a typical case.
After reading your comment I decided to have another look at it. I knew last time that it was a weird book, and that it was enjoyed by a lot of people. But even looking at the first page of it again I just don’t feel compelled to read it. Maybe some day.
There's a few things like that which have really made me realize how visual books are, and how challenging they are to translate to the spoken word (simple example, imagine how to express with your tone of voice that this is a parenthetical rather than a new sentence).
In the end I came away from it more with a feeling I had lived a part of life in another person’s (really several peoples’) shoes, less that there was any particular climactic aha! moment. Life, as wonderful as it is, still has its banalities and mundanities. You’re not missing out on a great truth, just a quirky story. Plenty of those to go around. Hope you find a good one!
Funny thing is he sort of parodied himself by going all out in his 2005 piece "Host" [1] by going so far as to nest footnotes within each other. That piece is actually interesting to compare across different media, as the interactivity of the web version makes it somewhat elegant to look at or skip the footnotes at the reader's discretion, whereas in the print edition in "Consider the Lobster", they are put in boxes within the main text and connected by arrows.
It takes a great deal of concentration/"work" to read his stuff but when you're in the right frame of mind all the depths and semi-related thoughts can make it all the more interesting...
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/host/30...
If you're using footnotes to cite things, you're doing it wrong: inline citations exist. If that's not enough for you, use a different syntax (say, ^[1] instead of ^1). If you're using it to define terms, you're doing it wrong: use a margin note. If that's not enough, you should probably typeset a nice box that makes definitions easy to identify. Footnotes (imo, of course) should only be used as a "here's more information for the curious" and should similarly only appear at the actual foot of a page (I despise endnotes).
My experience is biased towards print and print-like (PDF) use of footnotes, but I don't think it's much of a problem to expect users to click every footnote when provided with a convenient pop-up UI like in the OP, provided that you've clearly defined a convention or pattern of their usage to your readers.
I do wish websites showed footnotes on hover, though... jumping within the page is nonsense and often mucks with URL sharing.
My personal preference is to use footnotes as you suggest -- as a "here's more information for the curious" option -- whereas citations should be linked to a "references" section -- either at the end of the chapter or the book or the overall article.
So footnotes retain the numbering system (1, 2, 3, etc.) throughout the chapter text, but how would you mark sentences for whom a reference is available?
* See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_(typography)#Numbering_an... for a sampling. These can be doubled if necessary -- so , ††, etc.
Either just name the damned work already in the text ("as Smith writes in Academic Observations (1972) ..."), or use a numbered note and cite the work fully or partially. Any decent bibliographic tool (LaTeX + BibTex) can handle long vs. short cites, and your reader will thank you. For any sufficient volume of references, footnotes are the only sensible tool.
There's also the silent notes form (unsure of the proper name) common in serious-but-nonacademic works --- no indictation in the main text but page-referenced notes with anchoring context. This solves one problem (interrupting the main text), but introduces another (failing to sufficiently notice additional references or comments).
That said, I do miss the fact that the form of footnotes on the printed page doesn't translate well to ebooks (except for PDFs on tablets) and HTML. I used to write IT industry research and our general style was fairly conversational. We tended to use footnotes a fair bit for things like:
- Bulletproofing. ("Yes, we know there some exceptions to the statement we just made like A, B, C but their edge cases that aren't really relevant to our central argument.)
- Short historical digressions that would drop the reader out of the flow.
- Short background that most readers probably know but just in case someone doesn't
And so forth. I do still feel like I've had a stylistic tool taken away given that I have to increasingly write knowing that I can't depend on having easy to scan footnotes at the bottom of the page and clicking through is way too obtrusive for the manner I usually use footnotes.
My issue with simpler citations like [13] is that it is hard to figure out whether two citations are to the same book. "Was [13] that reference to the horrible tome of complete mathematics, or was that [14]" "Was [15] the paper this is trying to generalize?". By creating a small amount of meaning, it becomes much easier to remember the actual reference.
My issue with longer citations, is that I generally don't care about the source of a statement. When I am trying to follow an argument, I will just take the statement as fact, and focus on the big picture. Only when the fact is surprising, or when I have gotten the big picture, will I care about the reference. By having full inline citations in the argument, the text of the argument gets very bloated. Making it much harder to get the high level point of the argument.
I can imagine this is a feature of very technical, close to mathematical proofs, kind of texts. For other fields, maybe this matter much less. Especially when 'truth' is a lot less objective, knowing the source of a statement becomes more important I guess.
Ellison will either expand on - or contradict - the author's points. Easily the most appropriate and defensible use of footnotes I've ever encountered.
Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AK78QVI/
"LE writes: Gardens last for hundreds of years, companies don't. That's because people love and take care of gardens."
HTML is now well into its 2nd quarter century, grew from academic origins, and yet still lacks a <footnote> or <note> element and standard presentation(s).¹ I've not followed developments at all closely, references here are based on current DDG searches, bit so far as I'm aware, the situation's not improved and has arguable regressed.
Suggestions to use <cite> fail as not all footnotes are citations. Using <aside> overloads the element, creates ambiguities as to usage, and leaves us with nonstandard footnote mechanisms.
There was a 2003 proposal for a <referral> tag which seems ... excessively Byzantine.²
David MacDonald's <note> element proposal seems to cover most of the features (and objections) I'd anticipate.³
I'd consider footnotes (bottom of current page), endnotes (end of document or section/chaper/article), sidenotes (margin adjacent to text), inline notes (parenthetical communts, such aas this), or pop-up dialogues to be for the most part implementation details of an underlying notes element. An author might specify a default presentation, but the reader or device / media properties could override this in all cases to suit needs, limitations, or preference.
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Notes:
1. HTML3 had the <FN> element, long since abandoned: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/footnotes.html
2. https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003May/att-0...
3. https://www.davidmacd.com/blog/html51-footnotes.html See also http://spec-ops.github.io/html-note/index.html
I agree with all of your conclusions except this one. You appear to be contradicting yourself. How does <aside> overload the element? It does the opposite, by semantically separating <cite>s from mere textual notes and letting the client present the two however the user wants. I agree that within each category, it should be up to the presentation layer whether they are popups or footnotes or endnotes or just hidden altogether, but the distinction between citations and notes is an important one that can't be easily inferred. So what's the problem?
Cite is a subset of notes.
Aside is ... at best a superset, if not something independent.
If you want uniform styling or behaviour, you'd need to distinguish aside notes from other asides, meaning page- and site-specific conventions, and no uniform and predictable practice.
Notes are sufficiently well defined and utilised that they deserve a dedicated element.
In the MDN example for cite it is inside of a footer element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ci...
I believe a combination of aside, cite, and footer can achieve most of what is wanted - at any rate the main problem is that footnote is a concept arising from printed works and perhaps not directly transferable to the infinite canvas that HTML in the browser represents.
on edit: minor clarification.
Again, how the note itself is presented should be definable by the author/publisher, media, device, or user, ranked from least to greatest priority.
Whilst infinite scroll is a misfeature, most such designs are based around subunits, usually articles. Notes at the end of an article, much as they typically appear in printed anthologies, encyclopedias, and collections, would seem a fairly obvious choice.
Most words have more than one meaning - the one you give for footnote is certainly one meaning of footnote, however if I go to https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/footnote it says "a note printed at the bottom of a page that gives extra information about something that has been written on that page" which I actually think is the commonly understood meaning.
This would also explain the strong relation between the words Footer and Footnote.
The Footnote was invented in a particular media, it was presented in a particular way that was suitable to that media. My main point is that there has not been an obvious way to translate between how it is used in that media to how it should be used in the browser, and therefore attempts to make a footnote element specification have met with lackluster response at best.
A footer typically contains information about its section: author, links to related documents, copyright data, etc.
https://www.w3.org/html/wiki/Elements/footer
A <footer> element is one possible container for a <note>. It is not the note itself, need not contain any notes, nor need notes appear in footers.
The mapping is both inaccurate and ambiguous.
Yes, I think that's the general problem. On the printed page (or a digital facsimile of one), footnotes work well because a reader can almost effortlessly redirect their eyes to the bottom of the page and tell at a glance if the footnote is something they care about and want to absorb. Clicking on links, flipping to the bottom of a long page, etc. is far more effort and pretty much defeats the purpose of many types of footnotes.
Less abandoned and more just a complete lack of HTML3 implementation. HTML3 was in some ways an early "spec from an ivory tower", and implementers essentially wrote HTML 3.2 in its place. That said, many of the ideas in HTML3 later came to fruition.
https://www.overleaf.com/articles/implementing-the-teachings...
> But I want to talk about the cognitive issues at play. When footnotes can contain anything from a citation to essential background information, the user is forced to break from the flow8 of reading – often in the middle of a sentence. This is a problem in both paper books and electronic books.
I think this is...the idea of footnotes? That you don't break the flow and it's safe to skip over them, but if you're coming back for a leisurely read later, you can look them up and see what you missed. [1] When you go over the text a second time, you can follow the references to the footnotes and see the interesting crumbs that the author laid out, which often lead to a train of thought separate from the main flow of words.
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[1] At least, this is how I have used footnotes for a while when reading, and it works quite well. YMMV, since people read and comprehend differently.
I'm prepared to believe that I haven't been taught to read in the right way. But there seems to be some disagreement on what the right way is.
If it's the type that does both then I have to look at every damn footnote only to be disappointed by a "Pfaffenberger, 2016" 90% of the time.
I don't have a good answer to these problems. Tufte style is better because I don't have to move my eyes that much. But there's only so much one can put in a note in the margin. And it still distracts.
This all comes down to Tufte's idea of letting the optic nerve do the work. A glance requires almost no conscious brainpower, this is why thumbing through a book you've read works so well. Thus I can glance over at the footnotes pages and decide if I care to read the note without even slightly interrupting my flow reading the main text.
I think academic papers largely get this right. First, footnotes and references are separated. Second, footnotes are actual footnotes at the foot of the corresponding page.
Used to be that was one of the distinctions between footnotes and end notes. This is an affordance where that lost distinction in ebooks is most felt, I think.
An equally old practice, however, is to use different marks for footnotes versus end notes, and that's something I've felt could be readopted in a digital context. In particular the asterisk, dagger, double dagger, very rare triple dagger symbology was used for foot notes only (as there are only a few such symbols, versus numerals, and they can't be "document global").
In a medium with hyperlinks, symbol uniqueness is less of a problem so asterisks for all footnotes and numbers for end notes is possible.
Similarly, we aren't as limited typographically with what metal we have available in ebooks, we could enlist a much wider variety of symbols (emoji notes, perhaps?), or even pair symbols and numbers.
Perhaps the biggest thing holding us back right now is that publishers want to use the same design tools for both print and ebook (for good reason), but ideas like increasing symbol variety or pairing symbols and numbers are both reasonable options to make it to print as well if they need to be kept close in similarity for ease of production.
It seems to be somewhat similar to what Edward Tufte does in his books, which is also putting the footnotes in the margins close to where they are brought up, and often even interrupting the current line for an additional note or image at the point of reference.
I do almost all my reading and general browsing on half-width windows (side note: I highly recommend this practice), but sometimes I break out a tab into its own window and maximize it for pages that don't play nice at half-width. Gwern's footnotes break if you ever transition from a full-width window and then drop down to half-width. (Whereas if you start at half-width and keep it that way, they work as intended.)
I wonder if the issue is with how footnotes are displayed electronically? Perhaps a Sufficiently Smart E-Reader could display a footnote as long as its footnote marker, sentence, line or paragraph (would need research to see which is best, I think) is on-screen.
However, thinking about it, they are completely nonfunctional for me when reading. Unless I am skimming a text, I will immediately look up any foot-note I come across. I suppose that, if it is a quick explanation of something I already know, or don't care about, it is easier to skip the footnote in full. Whereas an in-line explanation is harder to skip because it is part of the text.
When I write text I quite often use footnotes - they are special for the organisation of the text, adding kind of additional dimensions to the main narration.
I don't (or very rarely) use ebooks, so hard to tell.