> Joe English writes:
> >In the spirit of keeping HTML simple,
> >I'd vote for dropping footnote support altogether.
>
> No, no.. I don't want to see footnote support go away. They are valuable as
> a mechanism for allowing spot annotation within a document. With footnotes,
> the author does not have to maintain lots of little documents for footnotes,
> and when the reader wants to read a footnote, the browser doesn't have to go
> out and fetch a URL.
>
> Besides, I've already gone to the trouble of implementing popup footnotes in
> my browser and I do *NOT* want to rip that code out, thank you very much.
Ah; I was (mis)interpreting "footnote" in the LaTeX
sense of "text that gets moved to the bottom of the
page with cross-reference indicators added". I don't
think HTML should have this any more than it should
have a <TABLEOFCONTENTS> element.
Popups are a different story; these can't be expressed
with existing markup, and probably do deserve their own
element instead of overloading <NOTE>.
--jenglish@crl.com
(Hmm... sure enough, the current spec says "A footnote
is typically rendered as a pop-up note." I should know
better by now to always check the docs instead of relying on
faulty memory.)