A question about footnotes.

[prog]

I'm wondering, very very loudly, if footnotes (or endnotes) that contain nothing but a website URL (something that occurs quite a bit in my current writing project) have any purpose in this, the amazing future. On the one hand, it's intuitive to put them there, since that's generally where simple attributions go. On the other hand, since I expect that many (most?) people who read this book will do so in a Web browser, it seems a bit roundabout.

Were I writing exclusively for the Web, you see, I'd just turn the text I'm annotating into a hyperlink. In this case, however, I'm writing in DocBook, with multiple target media (well... Web and print, at least) in mind. In print, a footnote containing a spelled-out URL doesn't look any more alien than any other kind of scholarly attribution, but on a webpage it does seem a bit too handwringy. (Yeah, I know the W3C does this all the time. That doesn't convince me. :) )

Were I to forgo footnotes for URL-only attributions and use inline linking instead, a given passage rendered into HTML might look something like this:

My favorite poem is "The Purple Cow" by Gelett Burgess. It is the basis for how I live my life, and sleep my nights.

And in print, something like this:

My favorite poem is "The Purple Cow" by Gelett Burgess (http://www.notfrisco.com/calmem/burgess.html). It is the basis for how I live my life, and sleep my nights.

...or maybe I could add, in the latter case, a preproccessing step that finds all attribution-style inline links and turns them into footnotes, before rendering the text into PostScript or whatever.

Any "traditional" attributions referring to rare works not living at the business end of some URL would receive a footnote no matter my book's publication medium. And in any case, URLs, along with brief descriptions of the content they point to, make up the bulk of my shockingly traditional-looking bibliography.

Any opinions on this from my learnéd pals?

(This is the sort of question I'd take to my editor in Book's previous incarnations, but I don't have one to turn to this time around. So instead I invite everyone I know to fill the role for me. Yay!)

Comments

[keimel.livejournal.com]

What do Strunk and White have to say about it?
Or the NYT Style guide?

I'd look to current print standards. I'd also look to possibly wget and/or mirror all the pages you reference for posterity. But that's me

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Strunk and White will have nothing to say about it; they wrote about writing style, not citation style. And I doubt the NYT style guide will help; it's geared towards writing newspaper articles as opposed to research papers.

In this case you would want, most likely, the MLA (Modern Language Association). (The Chicago Manual of Style, insofar as it's a university press's style guide, might also help.) See, for instance, http://www.mla.org/publications/style/style_faq/style_faq4.

For comparison, one entry in the bibliography of my generals paper was:

Albro, Daniel M. 1998. “Evaluation, Implementation, and Extension of Primitive Optimality
Theory.” Unpublished Master’s thesis, UCLA.
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/people/albro/papers.html

In the text this was cited simply as "Albro (1998)", which is standard citation form for linguistics papers.

That's not entirely an answer for what you're doing. All told, I much prefer the latter of your two options--there's no reason, I think, not to spell out the URL for the sake of people who might print the page.

Then again, perhaps there's a nearby librarian who would want to weigh in.

[keimel.livejournal.com]

indeed, chicago manual - that's one of the ones that was in my head. okie.

I are not a writer. ;)

[jadelennox]

Yours thar is APA, looks like, which is standard for social sciences. MLA is humanities.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I realize that MLA is humanities, and it wouldn't surprise me if we follow some sort of social science standard. I know hard science standard is something else as well: I think it's something like "The point was made in Turing 1948 that..." Or I may misremember.

I've also seen linguistics papers, almost all of them European, whose citations read something like "According to Chomsky[1], the syntax of..." with reference entries that read: "[1] Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Aspects of..." and so forth. Sometimes these are sorted alphabetically and numbered in that order, and sometimes they're numbered consecutively in the text and thus sorted out of alphabetical order in the references.

At any rate, I've no real idea which would be standard for Prog's work, but I'd bet it's MLA.

(And no, I had no idea LJ autolinked like that, but I wish they hadn't, because it makes it look like there was a link to the Albro paper in my references; there wasn't, even in the PDF file, in which it would have been possible. I guess that's part of "auto-format". Also: threaded conversations can get weird when one is replying to two different sections of thread like this.)

from across the fence (iow, from another field)

[ex-colorwhe.livejournal.com]

The current MLA Handbook notes that "electronic texts are not as fixed and stable as their print counterparts" and says "[s]ince electronic texts can be readily altered, an online source must be considered unique each time it is accessed." They therefore recommend providing a date of access for each citation (as well as the date of original publication).

This could only work with the longer footnote/endnote approach, not the hyperlink approach. But a clickable source is smoother and cooler to be sure. So I guess the question is, how much would you feel it to disrupt your text if you used hyperlinks and then one of them changed? Would you feel pressured to regularly check up on them to make sure they're the same? Or is this all irrelevant because it's from a lit guide?

Re: from across the fence (iow, from another field)

[jadelennox]

Yes, if you're actually citing professionally, you need to list the date of access as the linked text might change. As long as you're losing smooth flow anyhow, you might as well give the full citation, for the reason Kyuss mentioned.

MLA style would be: Sloan, Bernie. "Digital Reference Services Bibliography." 27 August 2003. 19 October 2003. <http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~b-sloan/digiref.html>. First date is last changed date of link as of date cited, if known. Second date is the last time I loaded the page and it was accurate as far as my citations go.

eep!

[jadelennox]

Did you know LJ autolinked like that?

[(Anonymous)]

personally, i'd recommend using the inline links, if only to make cut-and-pasting easier. or braindead conversion algorithms. i've received too many emails where the text/plain part of the multipart/alternative was the equivalent of 'just follow this link', with nothing else, because the appropriate thing to do with an a href= tag is just to show the visible part, right?

-kyuss

[(Anonymous)]

If you are using DocBook, you should use ulink not footnote. In HTML output the ulink will be converted to a href and in print output the url will either appear in brackets after the marked phrase or as a footnote.

[xymotik.livejournal.com]

A study of scientific papers with non-functioning links in the footnotes was just released. Confirms what we already know, but interesting nevertheless.