[WikiEN-l] footnotes and citations

Sun Jan 11 06:27:36 UTC 2004

On Saturday 10 January 2004 13:56, Graham Burnett wrote:
> > However, wiki-markup has no convenient way of representing footnotes and
> > citations.  In my fantasy, some hypertexty mechanism could give you the
> best 
> > of both world--invisible footnotes that don't interrupt the text but can
> be
> > made visible if you want to trace the authority for something.
>
> This is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind, but didn't express too
> well due to the imbibing of far too much home-made wine last night ;-)

I was thinking about this problem. I think that probably the best way for 
solving it is introducing pseudo-namespaces "Footnote:" and "Citation:". 
These would display in the text as numbers, consistent with current URL 
inlining:

Some text [http://site1.com], with a [[Footnote: This is a footnote]], and 
then a [http://site2.com], and a [[Citation: This Book by Someone]] would 
render:

Some text [1], with a [2], and then a [3], and a [4] would render:

Now, the simplest thing to do is having a link that leads to nowhere (#) and 
the text of the footnote/citation would be displayed as hover text (just as, 
when you hold your mouse over a link to an article for some time, the name of 
the article which realy is beign linked to is displayed). The proper thing to 
do, though it is a bit complicated, would be that, in addition to above, text 
of the footnote/citation is actually added on the fly to the 
Footnotes/References paragraph of the article, the link points to 
footnote/citation's anchor, and next to the footnote/citation there is a link 
(or more of them) that says "go back" and points to an anchor in the text 
next to the citation number. Perhaps, as the first solution, browser 
detection could be done, and browsers which are not capable of displaying 
hover text would be fed with [2: This is a footnote] text instead.