A question about footnotes.
Dec. 7th, 2003 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progI'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:
And in print, something like this:
...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!)
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!)
eep!
Date: 2003-12-07 10:30 pm (UTC)