Meta: I would recommend distinguishing between citation-notes and content-notes. Scrolling a long way down to find a citation is annoying and distracting, but so is the feeling that I might be missing some content if I don’t scroll down to look.
That would be useful. I guess the way I’ve seen this done sometimes is to use symbols like * † ‡ for content footnotes and numbers for citation endnotes? But that usually works on paper, where pages are short and you can see the content of the footnote at a glance. I’m not sure I’ve seen a solution for this that works on the web. It’d be nice to have an integrated Less Wrong footnote system so that we could test different ways of displaying the content. Maybe a hover-over-the-footnote-to-read-its-contents feature?
I’ve been very pleased with it on gwern.net; might be a little tricky on LW because it relies on the footnotes all having a particular name which the Javascript can then blindly load a related footnote in the popup, or whatever, and LWers seem to use various tools to generate footnoted-HTML (when they do at all).
Until that sort of feature is implemented, what about footnote links to the content while having text (no link) to the references? Also helpful would be a “return to where this number is in the text” function. I anticipate this solution taking less time while being less robust.
Here’s an example. The body text footnote numbers link to the bottom, and a return arrow links you back to the citation. Major problem on the linked website is that the page seems to have to reload. I don’t know of any way to make citations such as these without the process being time-intensive unless you write your own citation manager or contact the linked-to blogger.
You could write footnote 1, where the number 1 is a link pointing only to this comment. Hovering over the 1 shows some text. I couldn’t seem to cancel the link formatting, so that might not be too useful unless you can somehow arrange that the footnotes are the first comment in your own thread.
I played in the sandbox and noticed that some things work differently there than here.
Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, there are gaps in browser support for
it. Also IIRC, using works in more browsers, but the text will show up
styled like a link unless some CSS tweaking is done.
That’s just a title tooltip isn’t it? You can set those in Markdown easily enough (eg. [display](http://hyperlink "hover text")), and you’re not allowed any sort of markup inside the tooltip, and they have severe length limitations too. So it’d be a major compromise. (I have, painfully, added them to the frontpage of gwern.net, but no one has ever commented on them or given any sign that they are useful, so I’ve never bothered with putting them elsewhere.)
Meta: I would recommend distinguishing between citation-notes and content-notes. Scrolling a long way down to find a citation is annoying and distracting, but so is the feeling that I might be missing some content if I don’t scroll down to look.
Apologies if this has been brought up before.
That would be useful. I guess the way I’ve seen this done sometimes is to use symbols like * † ‡ for content footnotes and numbers for citation endnotes? But that usually works on paper, where pages are short and you can see the content of the footnote at a glance. I’m not sure I’ve seen a solution for this that works on the web. It’d be nice to have an integrated Less Wrong footnote system so that we could test different ways of displaying the content. Maybe a hover-over-the-footnote-to-read-its-contents feature?
I’ve seen this work well elsewhere.
I’ve been very pleased with it on gwern.net; might be a little tricky on LW because it relies on the footnotes all having a particular name which the Javascript can then blindly load a related footnote in the popup, or whatever, and LWers seem to use various tools to generate footnoted-HTML (when they do at all).
Until that sort of feature is implemented, what about footnote links to the content while having text (no link) to the references? Also helpful would be a “return to where this number is in the text” function. I anticipate this solution taking less time while being less robust.
Here’s an example. The body text footnote numbers link to the bottom, and a return arrow links you back to the citation. Major problem on the linked website is that the page seems to have to reload. I don’t know of any way to make citations such as these without the process being time-intensive unless you write your own citation manager or contact the linked-to blogger.
Yes, if a volunteer would like to do that for finished drafts of my posts as I complete them, that would be great.
I’m not getting that. It seems to just be using anchors; why would that happen?
It might just be a browser/connection/processor speed problem on my end. Thanks for checking!
You could write footnote 1, where the number 1 is a link pointing only to this comment. Hovering over the 1 shows some text. I couldn’t seem to cancel the link formatting, so that might not be too useful unless you can somehow arrange that the footnotes are the first comment in your own thread.
I played in the sandbox and noticed that some things work differently there than here.
This works (if entered with the HTML editor):
Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, there are gaps in browser support for it. Also IIRC, using works in more browsers, but the text will show up styled like a link unless some CSS tweaking is done.
That’s just a title tooltip isn’t it? You can set those in Markdown easily enough (eg.
[display](http://hyperlink "hover text")), and you’re not allowed any sort of markup inside the tooltip, and they have severe length limitations too. So it’d be a major compromise. (I have, painfully, added them to the frontpage of gwern.net, but no one has ever commented on them or given any sign that they are useful, so I’ve never bothered with putting them elsewhere.)Grantland’s sidenotes are the best I’ve seen—http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6963024/video-games-killed-video-game-star