It would be nice for the posts to not lose information when printed out, and link rot may be a problem with URLs. Might use a LaTeX style bibilography where you have [Pet78] in the text which links to the Peters 1978 entry in the bibliography which has the standard biblography details and a hyperlink to the article, where the URL is both written out in text and a hyperlink.
In the footnote style, all footnotes are unique, so you could have the footnote bodies have links back to the text where the initial footnote was, but why bother since browsers have back buttons.
Reading these complaints, I can’t help but feel a little smug about my own articles on gwern.net—not only do I have real footnotes, I have floating footnotes to make it even easier, and I usually have fulltext as well. To top it all off, I have an elaborate archiving system just to deal with linkrot.
Smugness is justified. The floating footnotes are a great solution.
The standard way to not lose your place while reading a Web page is to Cmd- or Alt-click a link, opening it in a new tab. But the other problem solved by the floating notes is that hyperlinks are generally opaque as to what’s behind them; a reader appreciates the extra context provided by a “title” attribute, your tooltips are an extension of that. What’s impressive is that they work equally well on a touchscreen device.
Since as far as I can tell this is done in Js+CSS, we could easily steal your mechanism for LW. Would you object?
ETA: never mind, I’ve found the source. I’m now feeling bad about using the clichéd phrase “usability nightmare”, but this would definitely be a good addition to LW.
Using well-supported CSS techniques, it is possible to create a document where URLs appear when printed, though it does require placing them in the document twice.
On the reader’s side, if you don’t mind monospace and no images, the text web browser Lynx can format a page with all URLs as footnotes: lynx -dump <URL>
Does the CSS make the URLs appear in the middle of text paragraphs, where there was a hyperlink in the online version, or as footnotes or references outside the main text? Nobody really wants the main text to get interrupted by noisy URLs all the time, and on the other hand having URLs written out in the open even in the online version doesn’t matter that much if it’s in the references section at the end of the document.
The Lynx thing probably isn’t good for pleasant reading, but might work for some kind of compromise scheme where you get a document that’s very human-readable and can be used for an OCR data restoration that gets you the text and references back, though not most of the formatting.
CSS allows one to make arbitrary content appear or disappear when a document is printed (given that said content is already in the document). So you can have plain hyperlinks on screen, but numbered footnotes/references in print.
It would be nice for the posts to not lose information when printed out, and link rot may be a problem with URLs. Might use a LaTeX style bibilography where you have [Pet78] in the text which links to the Peters 1978 entry in the bibliography which has the standard biblography details and a hyperlink to the article, where the URL is both written out in text and a hyperlink.
In the footnote style, all footnotes are unique, so you could have the footnote bodies have links back to the text where the initial footnote was, but why bother since browsers have back buttons.
Reading these complaints, I can’t help but feel a little smug about my own articles on gwern.net—not only do I have real footnotes, I have floating footnotes to make it even easier, and I usually have fulltext as well. To top it all off, I have an elaborate archiving system just to deal with linkrot.
Smugness is justified. The floating footnotes are a great solution.
The standard way to not lose your place while reading a Web page is to Cmd- or Alt-click a link, opening it in a new tab. But the other problem solved by the floating notes is that hyperlinks are generally opaque as to what’s behind them; a reader appreciates the extra context provided by a “title” attribute, your tooltips are an extension of that. What’s impressive is that they work equally well on a touchscreen device.
Since as far as I can tell this is done in Js+CSS, we could easily steal your mechanism for LW. Would you object?
ETA: never mind, I’ve found the source. I’m now feeling bad about using the clichéd phrase “usability nightmare”, but this would definitely be a good addition to LW.
Well, I didn’t write it in the first place, and I’d be happy to see it on LW.
Using well-supported CSS techniques, it is possible to create a document where URLs appear when printed, though it does require placing them in the document twice.
On the reader’s side, if you don’t mind monospace and no images, the text web browser Lynx can format a page with all URLs as footnotes:
lynx -dump <URL>
Does the CSS make the URLs appear in the middle of text paragraphs, where there was a hyperlink in the online version, or as footnotes or references outside the main text? Nobody really wants the main text to get interrupted by noisy URLs all the time, and on the other hand having URLs written out in the open even in the online version doesn’t matter that much if it’s in the references section at the end of the document.
The Lynx thing probably isn’t good for pleasant reading, but might work for some kind of compromise scheme where you get a document that’s very human-readable and can be used for an OCR data restoration that gets you the text and references back, though not most of the formatting.
CSS allows one to make arbitrary content appear or disappear when a document is printed (given that said content is already in the document). So you can have plain hyperlinks on screen, but numbered footnotes/references in print.