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

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?

[(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.