link soup

[John Gruber]

Yuri T. <qaramazov at gmail.com> wrote on 8/21/05 at 6:00 PM:


> Good.  Should there be a page somewhere (a wiki?) that lists all the

> features that have already been agreed upon but are not yet

> "required"?


Maybe, but I doubt it. A general-purpose FAQ is probably what I'll
add eventually, and it could contain the handful of planned syntax
additions and changes.



> What I see on DaringFireball is this:

> 

> <div class="footnote">

> <hr />

> <ol>

> <li id="fn1-2005-07-20">

> <p>Footnote text. 

>      <a href="#fnref1-2005-07-20"  class='footnoteBackLink' 

> title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">&#8617;</a></p>

> </li>

> 

> This seems flexible enough.  I guess one could zap the <hr> and the

> backlinks via CSS.


I want the `<hr />`, personally, but I agree that it's not something
everyone would want. Other people might want a small header, like
"Notes:" or something like that.



> One thing, however: at this point you are having Markdown inserting

> ENGLISH into the HTML, which raises the question of what one should do

> with a non-english website.  I suppose one can just suppress the

> display of the tool-tip.


That's another good point. I don't think there's any good way to do
footnotes without some decent configuration options, including
things like some control over the output HTML structure, the markers
for backlinks, and the strings for the tooltips.



> Interestingly, this doesn't leave the same flexibility in terms of

> numbering styles as the <ol> in the footnote div.  I.e., once you put

> a "1" here, there is no easy CSS way to change it to "i" or to a kana

> symbol.   If we wanted to be ahead of the browsers, we could try

> generating

> 

> <a href="#fn1-2005-07-20"><span class='footnote-marker'>1</span></a></sup>

> 

> to allow those who want to zap the footnote-marker and insert the

> apropriate alternative list item ("i", "a") etc. using ":before,"

> "counter()" and "list-style-type".   (See

> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/generate.html)  To this best of my

> knowledge, however, this is only supported by Opera at the moment.


This would be a nice feature, but there's no practical utility to
doing something that isn't supported in browsers other than Opera.

-J.G.