link soup

[Mark Smith]

@ 20:51 on 22.8.05, Michel Fortin wrote:


>Le 2005-08-22 à 12:34, Mark Smith a écrit :



>> I was thinking about sidenotes and came to the provisional personal

>> conclusion that they are the least good fit (of the various

>> foot/end/side note types) with "endnote syntax". They won't normally

>> need any two-way "linking" (thanks to their advantageous positioning)

>> and there are already some simple-enough pure-css solutions.

>

>The problem is that this doesn't degrade too well when you remove the  

>style sheet, like in a feed reader. So you need to convert them back  

>to footnotes for the syndication feed.


Yes...



>The way I see it, footnotes, sidenotes, endnotes, literature  

>references are all the same. They are all notes embedded in the  

>middle of a longer document. What changes is the way they are  

>displayed, but making a different syntax for each would be silly. No?


Yes. No argument, other than the fact that there isn't really any
requirement for "hyperlinking" sidenotes. Their positioning makes them
"self-linking".

My intended point was that *if* there is a need for two styles in a
document and **if** Markdown attempts to address this need, then the one
to pare-off from the rest would be the side notes. Two reasons being,
that a relatively straightforward and distinct syntax could be used and
that, as you say, you *must* have dedicated CSS for the sidenotes
anyway.

This was intended as discussion about the idea (from Yuri IIRC) that
perhpas we need a separate syntax for literature references. My
estimation is that there is a maximum of "two syntaxes worth" in this
whole footendsidenote issue and if that's the case, then footnotes,
endnotes and literature citations could probably share one, and
sidenotes could have the other. No ? Sort of a follow on poin to my
personal (and probably not that resonant) desire to have the footnote
syntax not hard-coded to <sup> output.

But, if I were a betting man. I'd bet that I'll lose this one.