That still has search problems! Consider: “see footnotes 3, 9, and 11–13”. How do you search for any of those 4 footnotes? The natural language approach is inherently ambiguous for such a hypertext problem which requires some formal support.
(The real solution there is footnote backlinks, like we have on Gwern.net: you can search for all references—site-wide, too—to a footnote by simply going to the footnote in question. If you’re not up to that, then a lightweight HTML approach would be to simply wrap each footnote number in a span and hide the text from display, but not search, so C-f ‘footnote 3’ would always hit the “prey³” construct.)
That still has search problems! Consider: “see footnotes 3, 9, and 11–13”. How do you search for any of those 4 footnotes? The natural language approach is inherently ambiguous for such a hypertext problem which requires some formal support.
(The real solution there is footnote backlinks, like we have on Gwern.net: you can search for all references—site-wide, too—to a footnote by simply going to the footnote in question. If you’re not up to that, then a lightweight HTML approach would be to simply wrap each footnote number in a span and hide the text from display, but not search, so C-f ‘footnote 3’ would always hit the “prey³” construct.)