Footnotes

[Mark Smith]

@ 20:45 on 28.7.05, John Gruber wrote:


>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.


Indeed, tricky, and this brings things part way back to the discussion
about superscript and subscript syntax for Markdown.

If there was a separate input syntax for superscript and subscript, one
could determine in the input whether footnote citations should be
superscripted, or handled in some other way (e.g. enclosed in
parenthesis or square brackets).

I'd prefer this to either having `<sup>` "hardwired" in the output, or
only having the facility to style the ID/class in CSS.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree ?

mark.