link soup

[John Gruber]

Yuri T. <qaramazov at gmail.com> wrote on 8/19/05 at 11:10 AM:


> Yeah, what _did_ get decided on footnotes?  Is there basically an

> agreement that the [^foo] is the way to go?


Markdown-wise, yes, that's pretty much decided. The syntax will look something like this:

    This is a paragraph with a footnote. [^note-id]
    
    [^note-id]: This is the text of the note.
    
        Multiple paragraphs can be included in the note text by
        indenting them, just as with multi-paragraph list item.
        However, unlike list items, even single-paragraph footnotes
        will be wrapped in `<p>` tags.

However, what I'm not sure about at all is the HTML markup that
should be generated to represent a note.

For the notes themselves, I'm thinking they should be in a `<div
class='footnote'>` at the end of the article. The notes would be in
an `<ol>` list. And the link-backs to the note references in the
text would work like my footnotes on Daring Fireball.

  <http://daringfireball.net/2005/07/footnotes>

However, about the note references themselves, I'm not sure. Right
now on DF, I'm using markup like this:

    <sup id='fnref1-2005-07-20'><a href="#fn1-2005-07-20">1</a></sup>

However, the `<sup>` tags aren't necessarily needed. I *could* just
use the `<a>` tag, and apply a class ("footnote_ref" or somesuch),
and then use CSS to style that tag as superscript. That way I could
get superscripted footnote refs, but anyone who wants to style their
footnote references otherwise wouldn't have to do so by applying
non-superscript styles to the `<sup>` tags.

However, the advantage to using `<sup>` tags is that you get
reasonable default styling without any CSS. This is very useful, for
example, for posts that are available via RSS.

Superscripting footnotes is very traditional in the print world.
However, on the web, footnotes are often just wrapped in literal
brackets:

    This is a paragraph with a footnote. [1]

Right now I'm leaning toward having Markdown generate markup like
this:

    <sup class="footnote-ref"  id="fnref1-2005-07-20">
    <a href="#fn1-2005-07-20">1</a></sup>

And if you *don't* want superscripted footnote references, you'll
have to manually apply a style to `<sup>` tags with
`class="footnote-ref"`.

-J.G.