Footnotes

[Alastair Rankine]

Denis Defreyne wrote:


> I don't believe footnotes fit in the scope of Markdown. Every syntax  

> element in Markdown has a HTML counterpart; footnotes do not. 


This observation is consistent with, but does not in itself confirm, the 
scope of Markdown. It seems to me that the scope of Markdown is actually 
the set of readable textual conventions that are *useful* when writing 
content for online distribution. The fact that these currently map 1:1 
to HTML elements is coincidental.

IMO the usefulness of the syntax trumps all other concerns. This is 
consistent with the stated design goal of making Markdown as readable as 
possible. For those of us who want to use footnotes in our source 
documents, the need to revert to HTML tags directly affects readability.

In fact, to date I have deliberately avoided footnotes -- mainly by 
using clumsy parenthetical comments like this one -- rather than incur 
the minor distraction of creating the HTML manually.

I am watching the footnotes discussion with interest. I will use them.