Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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...There have been many attempts to get a <footnote> element into HTML...

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

Does footnote (bottom of current page) in html mean bottom of viewport or bottom of webpage that when printed out can take 4-5 pages. If bottom of webpage what is footnote if infinite scroll.

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.

>perhaps not directly transferable

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.

"Footer" is a page/section element, not an in-text document relation. Footnotes are document or article relations, similar to sections or figures. The refer between the main text and supplemental material, with enumeration.

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.

>"Footer" is a page/section element, not an in-text document relation. Footnotes are document or article relations, similar to sections or figures. The refer between the main text and supplemental material, with enumeration

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.

The <footer> element represents a footer for its nearest ancestor sectioning content or sectioning root element.

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.

> 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.

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?

An aside might be something other than a note.

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.

> 1. HTML3 had the <FN> element, long since abandoned: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/footnotes.html

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.

Fair enough. The presence of the element was unknown to me until I'd written my comment, and I'm not fully straight on all the twists and kinks in the evolution of HTML, other than vaguely recalling that XHTML was Right Out.

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