possibility is for the “body” of a sidenote to be low-opacity or hidden until you mouse over it (while leaving the title section of the sidenote visible for easy find)
That would rather defeat the point of the sidenotes, which is to allow you to glance over and read it without moving anything but your eyes.
There is, fundamentally, a trade-off, between three factors:
Using lots of sidenotes/footnotes/etc. in general;
Having them be easily parsable at a glance (instead of requiring active interaction);
Having them not be distracting.
The current implementation is one particular point along those trade-offs; you could argue that some other point would be superior, but it’s at least not obvious that any such superior point exists.
I like the fact that when I mouseover a sidenote a thing pops up on the main text that lets me see what the sidenote is referring to… but think it could actually be more visible (I still have to hunt for it).
As you’ll likely be unsurprised to hear, we’ve actully had complaints that the citation highlighting is too obtrusive, and interferes with reading the text around it while you’re hovering over a sidenote… conflicting preferences and competing access needs strike again!
Yeah. Agree that that’s all complicated and tradeoffs are hard. Just my 2cents.
(Looking forward to future world where it can tell what part of the screen you’re looking at and hide/show things dynamically based on how long you’ve looked at them. Also not looking forward to all the dystopian hellholes that will probably results from that technology when it exists)
I am excited and terrified of eyetracking for foveated rendering in VR for precisely those reasons: it will be both awesome & awful and I don’t know how it’ll net out. (All the more reason to keep paying for VR games, I guess, to help ensure that the user is the customer rather than the product...)
That would rather defeat the point of the sidenotes, which is to allow you to glance over and read it without moving anything but your eyes.
There is, fundamentally, a trade-off, between three factors:
Using lots of sidenotes/footnotes/etc. in general;
Having them be easily parsable at a glance (instead of requiring active interaction);
Having them not be distracting.
The current implementation is one particular point along those trade-offs; you could argue that some other point would be superior, but it’s at least not obvious that any such superior point exists.
As you’ll likely be unsurprised to hear, we’ve actully had complaints that the citation highlighting is too obtrusive, and interferes with reading the text around it while you’re hovering over a sidenote… conflicting preferences and competing access needs strike again!
Yeah. Agree that that’s all complicated and tradeoffs are hard. Just my 2cents.
(Looking forward to future world where it can tell what part of the screen you’re looking at and hide/show things dynamically based on how long you’ve looked at them. Also not looking forward to all the dystopian hellholes that will probably results from that technology when it exists)
I am excited and terrified of eyetracking for foveated rendering in VR for precisely those reasons: it will be both awesome & awful and I don’t know how it’ll net out. (All the more reason to keep paying for VR games, I guess, to help ensure that the user is the customer rather than the product...)