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Footnote
In which we debate a design detail
Regular readers might have noticed that yesterday’s post was a bit of an experiment. In case you didn’t spot what the experiment involved, here’s a clue:
Ever since it started, this blog has gone in for copious footnotes, on just about every post,* flagged up with stars in the usual way. One thing I’ve never been entirely happy with, though, is that the more footnotes you have, the more stars each note requires. A fifth or sixth footnote starts to get unwieldy, as Monday’s post shows. So I’ve been idly thinking about other ways to indicate a footnote: symbols, numbers, or something else.
You can tell I’ve been idly thinking about it, because it’s taken me over three years to try an experiment with using numbers instead. I’m not really sure, though, whether I like it or not. K, I know, definitely doesn’t like the new numbered style; she was almost tempted to leave a comment saying “Bring back the stars!” so she must care. Or I could try out a series of different symbols, instead of a line of stars. More experimentation might be called for.
* When I first started drafting this post, it didn’t have any. “Oh, the irony”, I thought to myself, “of having no footnotes on a post about footnotes.” Fortunately, one soon came to me.
Nested footnotes don’t work quite as well with numbers as with symbols. But if you want to be the true geek that you know you are, you can always have links in the symbols.
Damn, someone noticed I’m a geek
Seriously, I felt like hunting you down and throttling you after the multi starred post!
)
Numbers are an improvement. The next step (I know this will be hard!) is to work those footnotes into the main narrative, somehow.
I quite liked the unwieldy strings of asterisks. But the numbers are cool too.
I’m not sure if working things into the main narrative will ever be fully possible. I like digressing and detouring when I speak; and this blog is me writing for my own amusement, more than anything, so I enjoy adding asides and parallel lines of thought, that would derail the main text if I tried to include them. I might give it a go, though. Possibly, when I come across a particularly interesting sideline waving at me, I should divert it into an entirely new post.
I’ll probably swap back and forth between numbers and asterisks for a while; numbers for heavily-footnoted posts, asterisks when I’ve only got one or two.