Comment by fhe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fhe | Hacker News Reader

I find the separation between the body of the essay and notes makes it harder to read. When I read PG's essay, I always have two tabs open, one on the essay and the other on the Notes section. When I come across a note reference, e.g. "the answer turns out to be completely different. [4]", I switch to the Notes tab to look it up. This back and forth between the two tabs disrupt the reading experience.

Wouldn't it be easier on the reader to simply include the Notes in the body part of the essay? Especially when the notes are short. For example the aforementioned note no. 4 goes:

"[4]Corollary: If you're not intellectually honest, your writing won't just be biased, but also boring, because you'll miss all the ideas you'd have discovered if you pushed for the truth."

Which is short, relevant, and insightful. What's the criteria for which piece of text goes into the body of the essay, and which goes to Notes? I guess if a substantial percentage of readers skip the Notes part, then it's a time-saving practice to separate the two.

You can click on [4] which brings you to the footnote and when done you can just use the back button which brings you back to [4] in the text. Works for me.

Sadly some of us (including me) have forcibly unlearned this method after discovering that too many combinations of browsers and webpages don't support this reliably. Having to manually scroll or search back to where one was reading after clicking an intra-page link and finding out that the back button doesn't work or navigates to somewhere unexpected is just too annoying in the long run.

With books, I tend to not bother with the notes if they are bundled up at the end of the book or chapter. I prefer to have them on the bottom of the page. A web page doesn't even have the benefit of easy page turning to a bookmark, so I think some medium adapted solution like mouse hover would be appropriate.

I couldn't help but think of Nicholson Baker's first novel [0].

> The Mezzanine tells this story through the extensive use of footnotes—some of them comprising the bulk of the page—as the narrator travels through his own mind and past. The footnotes are quite detailed and sometimes diverge into multiple levels of abstraction. Near the end of the book, there is a multi-page footnote on the subject of footnotes themselves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mezzanine

I agree, having them separated is quite bad. They could have just put them into brackets ( ) and include it in the normal body of the text, that way if you're not interested you can just skip it, but if you are interested then you don't have to list through/switch tabs/search at the bottom of the page/...

I believe that the reading flow is quite important, probably near the top of importance, because if the reader gets into the reading flow they're much more likely to read it all and enjoy it!

This is the use case for Tufte-format layout. Notes, footnotes, and other stuff go into a comfortably-wide right-hand margin.

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