These days, I try to remove tangents from my writing, publishing any good tangents as microblog content instead.
I'm also considering unhyperlinked footnotes, and letting the reader scroll to the bottom if they want, the low-tech way. It's less distracting that way, and there's no accessibility issues either.
paradox460 · 1h ago
On my personal site, if there's enough room, I show the footnotes to the side of the page, with their top roughly aligned with their position in the text. There's still links, and hovering over the superscript indicator adds a slight background to the corresponding sidebar element. This seems to work well,on desktop. They still follow all the traditional conventions you'd expect, with anchors and return links, so if you can't use the sidebar, it's not an utterly useless experience either
I've been thinking about adding popups, koreader style, for mobile, but haven't yet. Partially because I haven't figured out some of the deeper UX concerns, but mostly because I'm lazy
Anyway, here's an article with a decent amount of footnotes (side notes?):
Those aren't footnotes. Those are endnotes. Footnotes go at the bottom of the same page they're cited on.
I hate that every e-book format I've encountered seems to only do endnotes, too.
paradox460 · 1h ago
Koreader let's you pop em up in a floating dialog box when you tap the superscript for it
egypturnash · 1h ago
huh, nice! Much better than the endnotes I get out of the Kindle app and Apple Books. Sadly there's no iThing version, as that's what I use.
paradox460 · 1h ago
Interestingly enough, I think the physical Kindle does this too. I haven't read a book with footnotes in ages on it, preferring the larger screen of my onyx box device for technical writing, but I have distinct memories of footnotes sharing the same interface as the definitions lookup features
JadeNB · 3h ago
I've always enjoyed the to-me graceful experience of coupling each link to a footnote with a return anchor, so that you get the (to olds like me) familiar experience of footnotes without the pain of navigating to the bottom and then forgetting where you came from. My memory is that Daring Fireball, among many other sites, does this. (I just checked, and it does. Here's the most recent article that uses a footnote: https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/apple_app_store_policy_up.... Here's the reference to the footnote: https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/apple_app_store_policy_up.... And here's the footnote itself: https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/apple_app_store_policy_up.... This does require some special handling if you refer to the same footnote multiple times, but, if you really need to do that, the solution could be as simple as having the second reference be to a new footnote that immediately refers to the old one.)
jaffathecake · 2h ago
Fwiw this technique is covered in the article, with an example, and the UX issues are discussed.
The simpler solutions presented do not have these issues.
JadeNB · 1h ago
You are right, thanks. Ironically, I didn't realize that because I only read the text:
> If the footnote markers are links, then the user can use the back button/gesture to return to the main content. But, even though this restores the previous scroll position, the user is still left with the challenge of finding their previous place in a wall of text^6.
and didn't read footnote 6, which mentions the technique I'm describing. But I still don't seem to see the UX issues, other than the mention of a teeny-weeny hit target, which I admit is perfectly legitimate. But I am an academic, so it is probably no surprise that imitating academia appeals to me.
out-of-ideas · 2h ago
i prefer them laid flat out too - grinds my gears when there is a wall of text, then trying to use the browsers built-in-search to find a text i remember but cannot find due to some hover/click-element that only displays text sometimes. though - i do not mind a list of sources at the bottom nor embedded within a bracket or w/e - there are many standards
(i guess what is worse are pages which re-invent the wheel and re-implement text-searching, like [gitlab i think], where the browser search is broken as its only displaying a sub-section of text at any given moment and browser search fails unless you scroll a page down and find again)
bshacklett · 2h ago
Ugh, this has become a huge issue with text editing controls. More and more, I find that content gets unloaded once it’s out of the editor’s viewport, making the browser’s built-in search fail.
out-of-ideas · 2h ago
xkcd standards; why use the standard search feature when you can build a new search feature per page per website ! new shiny, ooo weeee ooo
- Dorian's expandable parentheticals (click on the gray phrases): https://doriantaylor.com/person/dorian-taylor#me
- Gwern's list of sidenote implementations: https://gwern.net/sidenote
- The ellipsis -> bottom modal pattern, found on buttondown articles like this one: https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/you-can-cheat-a-t...
These days, I try to remove tangents from my writing, publishing any good tangents as microblog content instead.
I'm also considering unhyperlinked footnotes, and letting the reader scroll to the bottom if they want, the low-tech way. It's less distracting that way, and there's no accessibility issues either.
I've been thinking about adding popups, koreader style, for mobile, but haven't yet. Partially because I haven't figured out some of the deeper UX concerns, but mostly because I'm lazy
Anyway, here's an article with a decent amount of footnotes (side notes?):
https://pdx.su/blog/2024-08-10-diy-permanent-xmas-lights/
I hate that every e-book format I've encountered seems to only do endnotes, too.
The simpler solutions presented do not have these issues.
> If the footnote markers are links, then the user can use the back button/gesture to return to the main content. But, even though this restores the previous scroll position, the user is still left with the challenge of finding their previous place in a wall of text^6.
and didn't read footnote 6, which mentions the technique I'm describing. But I still don't seem to see the UX issues, other than the mention of a teeny-weeny hit target, which I admit is perfectly legitimate. But I am an academic, so it is probably no surprise that imitating academia appeals to me.
(i guess what is worse are pages which re-invent the wheel and re-implement text-searching, like [gitlab i think], where the browser search is broken as its only displaying a sub-section of text at any given moment and browser search fails unless you scroll a page down and find again)
personally, i blame javascript