link soup

[Yuri T.]

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


Good.  Should there be a page somewhere (a wiki?) that lists all the
features that have already been agreed upon but are not yet
"required"?


> 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.


What I see on DaringFireball is this:

<div class="footnote">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1-2005-07-20">
<p>Footnote text. 
     <a href="#fnref1-2005-07-20"  class='footnoteBackLink' 
title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>

This seems flexible enough.  I guess one could zap the <hr> and the
backlinks via CSS.  It is also clean enough to be easily converted to
latex, it seems.  One can also use CSS to get this list shown with
roman numerals, hebrew letters, kana, etc.  I am curious if there is a
way to format this to make it show up with daggers instead of numbers.
 I not suggesting this as the default, and maybe something like this
would just need to be left to javascript.

One thing, however: at this point you are having Markdown inserting
ENGLISH into the HTML, which raises the question of what one should do
with a non-english website.  I suppose one can just suppress the
display of the tool-tip.


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

> brackets:

> 

>     This is a paragraph with a footnote. [1]


One can always add the brackets via CSS (using :before and :after). 
It seems far easier than _removing_ them.


>     <sup class="footnote-ref"  id="fnref1-2005-07-20">

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


Interestingly, this doesn't leave the same flexibility in terms of
numbering styles as the <ol> in the footnote div.  I.e., once you put
a "1" here, there is no easy CSS way to change it to "i" or to a kana
symbol.   If we wanted to be ahead of the browsers, we could try
generating

<a href="#fn1-2005-07-20"><span class='footnote-marker'>1</span></a></sup>

to allow those who want to zap the footnote-marker and insert the
apropriate alternative list item ("i", "a") etc. using ":before,"
"counter()" and "list-style-type".   (See
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/generate.html)  To this best of my
knowledge, however, this is only supported by Opera at the moment.

Also, I am wondering if there is a way to design it so that
footnotes-at-the-bottom is the default behavior (without any CSS), yet
there is a way to make them pop-up like tooltips through CSS.  The
problem is that it seems that the standard way of doing it presumes
that the the footnote/tooltip text is placed inside the footnote's <a>
tag.  Is there a way to match them up via IDs?  Maybe people can just
do this with javascript if they really feel like it...  Alternatively,
there could be some kind of --inline-footnotes tag that generates
something like

<sup class="footnote-ref"  id="fnref1-2005-07-20">
 <a href="#fn1-2005-07-20">
  <span class='footnote-marker'>1</span>
  <span class='footnote-text'>The text of the footnote</span>
 </a>
</sup>

  - yuri