41–43 of 43 posts
Ah yes. This is one of the marvels of having browser APIs that want to give you (almost) complete control over the machine, and let you do (almost) anything... Upside: You can do almost anything. Downside: You have to manage (almost) everything yourself. Downside: It lets other people do real dumb/annoying/inconvenient/stupid things, and you get to deal with the result.
Slightly off topic, but I love the way that blog design uses the right gutter for annotations. Keeps it in context beautifully.
I find them visually distracting. I prefer Wikipedia style hover footnotes so they are hidden unless I decide I can't live without the citation etc.
Hover has poor usability on mobile. I don't think that I'm the only one who reads the phone on even short trips.
Slightly off topic, but I love the way that blog design uses the right gutter for annotations. Keeps it in context beautifully.
I find them visually distracting. I prefer Wikipedia style hover footnotes so they are hidden unless I decide I can't live without the citation etc.
However, most of the interesting uses of footnotes people talk about, like nested stories, are not like this. Novels like _House of Leaves_ or _Infinite Jest_ for example. But these are fine also, because you can just assume you want to read the footnote and follow the reference. It just makes reading it more nonlinear and like a CYOA.
However, in between, there is no golden mean. It is very frustrating to have a book where half the footnotes are mere bibliographic information but the other half are interesting comments, digressions, meta-commentary, and so on. You either spend a lot of effort breaking from the text with wasted clicks/context-switches, or you miss a lot of important things. This is bad enough when it's a book using footnotes and you only have to keep glancing down at the bottom to see what it is - but it gets far worse with endnotes, and if they require multiple clicks each, you just give up!