Footnotes

[John Gruber]

Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote on 07/27/05 at 1:26 pm:


> 1.    A suffix/prefix for the footnote id, which in the case of a weblog

>   should be different for each entry on an index page.

> 2.    A class for the `<sup>` or `<a>` element used as a footnote marker.

> 3.    Options about how to output the footnotes.

> 

> The hard part here is 1 because it need integration with the software 

> running the web site. But such integration is not always needed either.


As for #2 and #3, I'm leaning toward the output I've been using on
Daring Fireball. There is no standardized way to set footnotes, so
Markdown users will just have to take it or leave it.

For the note references themselves, however, I'm thinking instead of
using `<sup>`, we should just use a single `<a>` tag with a class of
"footnote_ref" or "footnote_reference" or something that like.

Then, if you want your note references to be superscripted, you can
just specify that in your CSS for the `footnote_ref` class. But this
way you could also use a style that wasn't superscripted at all.

The downside, though, is that if your output markup is displayed
somewhere that doesn't use your CSS file -- like, say, in an RSS
aggregator -- then the footnotes won't look like footnotes at all,
they'll just look like numbers that are links. So that's the
argument for using `<sup>` tags in the output.

-J.G.