As a dedicated and professional computer scientician, I believe that all indices must start at zero. Not one, not two, but zero. The zeroth element is sacrosanct to our creed; for in the beginning there was nothing. If you're using WordPress's JetPack, it uses an ancient version of Markdown Extra. You can either monkeypatch this, or install a separate Markdown plugin. I've patched my fork of it in two specific places. Firstly, I set $this->footnote_counter = 0; in the initial config of the …
Continue reading →
I've been thinking a lot about footnotes in Markdown. I've contributed a patch to make them slightly better in WordPress. Now I'm wondering how to make them more useful by enhancing their pop-up title text. To that end, I'm writing a patch for PHP Markdown which will display the first ~200 characters of a footnote in the pop-up title text. Hover over the superscript number and you'll get a preview of the footnote. Dealing with all sorts of weird HTML & Markdown edge-cases is tricky. So, if…
Continue reading →
Previously, I've written about using Footnotes in WordPress Markdown. A reader notified me that the footnotes weren't very accessible. This blog post describes the problem and proposes a solution. The Problem Using WordPress's JetPack, markdown footnotes are rendered as: Some text <sup id="fnref-1234-1"><a href="#fn-1234-1" class="jetpack-footnote">1</a></sup> ... <li id="fn-1234-1">The footnotes. <a href="#fnref-1234-1">↩</a></li> There are two main problems with this: The <sup>1</sup> …
Continue reading →
I've been thinking about better ways to display footnotes in eBooks. So this is my horrible and hacky way to display inline footnotes in pure HTML and CSS. No Javascript. Here's how it works: The most cited work in history, for example, is a 1951 paper <details> <summary>1</summary> Lowry, O. H., Rosebrough, N. J., Farr, A. L. Randall, R. J. J. Biol. Chem. 193, 265–275 (1951). </details> describing an assay to determine the amount of protein in a solution. I've use <…
Continue reading →
I've been reading lots more non-fiction books than normal. And I'm getting increasingly annoyed about footnotes. Footnotes are a weird skeuomorph hangover from the days of printed text. I don't think they are really suited to eBooks - but they seem to have come along for the ride into the future. There are a few things that really annoy me from a usability point of view. Some of these are the fault of the author, some the publisher, some the eBook format, and some the reader app. Firstly,…
Continue reading →
