link soup

[Mark Smith]

@ 20:37 on 21.8.05, John Gruber wrote:


>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.


[...]


>...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.


[...]


>...the advantage to using `<sup>` tags is that you get

>reasonable default styling without any CSS.


[...]


>Superscripting footnotes is very traditional in the print world.

>However, on the web, footnotes are often just wrapped in literal

>brackets


There is also a distinction in print to make between footnotes and
references/bibliographies. The traditional difference in print being
that footnotes appear on the same page as their "citation" and
references appear at the end of documents/papers or chapters. This
becomes largely indistinct on the web since multi-page printed documents
will often be single "page" documents on the web, so, in many cases,
there is no longer any useful "geographical" distinction between
footnotes and references. In printed media, reference citations are
almost never superscripted.

...So...

i'd register a small vote for going with a straight <a> ref class for
Markdown's footnotes and requiring CSS to style it, rather than a
dedicated superscripted class. This is admittedly because I'll be
hijacking the footnotes syntax for references more often than I'll be
using classical "footnotes" and would be serving the output with CSS
anyway.

mark.