Asterisk footnotes

[Patrick Kelly]

How about using double asterisk, or asterisk plus a digit to flag a  
footnote?  ex:


> This a very interesting subject.**

>

> ** According to blah blah blah.


OR


> These things*1 are quite plentiful.*2

>

> *1 Only the green ones.

>

> *2 "Plentiful" as in "lots of".


This may not be the most obvious way to provide footnotes, but it's  
not too bad (IMHO), and I don't think it'll conflict with the  
existing list-type things.  I would think that providing some method  
to do footnotes may cure folks of doing it the wrong way (i.e.  
accidentally making lists).

This may too easily collide with mathematical expressions.  So, would  
it be OK to treat it as a footnote only if the footnote text is  
provided?  That would be: scan for the things that look like  
footnotes within 3 spaces of the beginning of the line (something  
like m/^ {0,3}\*(\*|[0-9)/, I'm just making that up on the spot, so  
it's probably wrong), then if the footnotes are found they get  
identified in the text as footnote asterisks/numbers.

I'm still sort of clueless what the HTML for a footnote is supposed  
to be.


On Nov 7, 2005, at 6:38 PM, John Gruber wrote:


> Aaron Swartz <me at aaronsw.com> wrote on 11/7/05 at 11:30 PM:

>

>> What about requiring a space before the bullet?

>

> In which case? The case of where you want this:

>

>  * Something here

>

> to be the footnote, not a single-item unordered list?

>

> My first impression is no, this wouldn't be a good rule, because in

> every other case I can think of off the top of my head, Markdown

> ignores 1-3 spaces at the beginning of a line, so it'd seem weird to

> me have a situation where a single line-leading space is meaningful.

> But it's just a first impression.

>

> -J.G.

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