[uf-new] note/notereference class-pattern microformat?

[Sebastian Heath]

Toby,

    Thanks for the link to http://www.w3.org/TR/relations.html . A  
little worrisome that it says: "Status The authorship of this document  
is unknown. It has no status."

I've spent a little time today looking at Markdown and related  
implementations of footnotes. A summary of what I think I know so far:

* Footnotes aren't directly documented in the 'official' markdown  
syntax [1]. The are briefly discussed under links.

* While footnotes aren't supported in the main php-markdown library  
[2], they are supported in php-markdown-extra [3]. To cut-and-paste  
the relevant sample from the doc:
That's some text with a footnote.[^1]
[^1]: And that's the footnote.

Gets you:
<p>That's some text with a footnote.
    <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" rel="footnote">1</a></sup></p>

<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>

<li id="fn:1">
<p>And that's the footnote.
    <a href="#fnref:1" rev="footnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>

</ol>
</div>
As you say rel/rev="footnote" out in the wild.
* kramdown[4] and maruku[5] supports the same syntax. I haven't seen  
what the output is.
* The post "About the Footnote"[6] at Daring Fireball is relevant  
here. With Joe Clark's response [7]. This is an old discussion.
* See Ignore the Code [8] for a recent post on implementing footnotes  
with a jquery library. Pretty clean and nice "pop up" footnotes but  
see below.

* I still think it is worth thinking about 'class="footnote"' within a  
standards writing environment (or "note" but I'm happy to use  
"footnote" as a generic). Here's why:

   The '<a rel/rev="footnote">' pattern characterizes the link, not  
the text of the reference, nor the footnote itself.

Go to the "Ignore the Code" html source. You'll see:

<li id="fn:275.examples">
<p>Such as screen readers, or touchscreen devices like iPads.&#160;<a  
class="footnotebacklink" href="#fnref:275.examples"  
rev="footnote"><img alt="back" src="/blog_images/footnoteback.png"></ 
a></p>
</li>

It is not semantically clear that the <p> is a footnote. Yes, the mini  
js libary can handle deriving the text, but that's a little bit of a  
hack. Much cleaner would be:

  '<li id="id="fn:275.examples" class="footnote">...</li>'

  or

  '<li>
    <p id="fn:275" class="footnote">...</p>
  </li>'

  But that is perhaps author preference.

We might see greater proliferation of js libraries that do things with  
footnotes if 'class="footnote" id="123"' had some backing to it. I  
can't decide whether the fact that it hasn't means that there wouldn't  
be any support for it.

  -Sebastian



[1] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
[2] http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
[3] http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/
[4] http://kramdown.rubyforge.org/syntax.html#footnotes
[5] http://maruku.rubyforge.org/maruku.html
[6] http://daringfireball.net/2005/07/footnotes
[7] http://blog.fawny.org/2005/07/24/footnote/
[8] http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/04/20/footnotes/

-------------
Sebastian Heath, Ph.D.
Clinical Assistant Professor,
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World,
New York University,
sebastian.heath at nyu.edu

On Sep 11, 2010, at 6:56 PM, Toby Inkster wrote:

> On Tue, 7 Sep 2010 13:26:20 -0400
> Sebastian Heath <sh1933 at nyu.edu> wrote:
>
>>  So perhaps the place to start is small: two classes for indicating
>> the relationship between notes and references to those notes in a
>> text. I'm purposefully punting on whether these notes are
>> end/foot/sidenotes, because that seems to be a runtime decision
>> and/or personal preference. I want to cover both.
>
> rel=footnote is pretty widely used. Despite the name, it doesn't  
> have do
> point to a note in the traditional footnote style, but could point to
> an endnote or a note on another page.
>
> It's mentioned in this old W3C pre-HTML-4.0 document:
>
> 	http://www.w3.org/TR/relations.html
>
> Various versions of Markdown include it in their HTML output.
>
>> I'm an RDFa and Digital Humanities geek who is dipping my toes into
>> the microformat community for the first time.
>
> Well, with RDFa 1.1 profiles, rel=footnote can even be successfully
> interpreted as RDFa.
>
> -- 
> Toby A Inkster
> <mailto:mail at tobyinkster.co.uk>
> <http://tobyinkster.co.uk>
>