Reading these complaints, I can’t help but feel a little smug about my own articles on gwern.net—not only do I have real footnotes, I have floating footnotes to make it even easier, and I usually have fulltext as well. To top it all off, I have an elaborate archiving system just to deal with linkrot.
Smugness is justified. The floating footnotes are a great solution.
The standard way to not lose your place while reading a Web page is to Cmd- or Alt-click a link, opening it in a new tab. But the other problem solved by the floating notes is that hyperlinks are generally opaque as to what’s behind them; a reader appreciates the extra context provided by a “title” attribute, your tooltips are an extension of that. What’s impressive is that they work equally well on a touchscreen device.
Since as far as I can tell this is done in Js+CSS, we could easily steal your mechanism for LW. Would you object?
ETA: never mind, I’ve found the source. I’m now feeling bad about using the clichéd phrase “usability nightmare”, but this would definitely be a good addition to LW.
Reading these complaints, I can’t help but feel a little smug about my own articles on gwern.net—not only do I have real footnotes, I have floating footnotes to make it even easier, and I usually have fulltext as well. To top it all off, I have an elaborate archiving system just to deal with linkrot.
Smugness is justified. The floating footnotes are a great solution.
The standard way to not lose your place while reading a Web page is to Cmd- or Alt-click a link, opening it in a new tab. But the other problem solved by the floating notes is that hyperlinks are generally opaque as to what’s behind them; a reader appreciates the extra context provided by a “title” attribute, your tooltips are an extension of that. What’s impressive is that they work equally well on a touchscreen device.
Since as far as I can tell this is done in Js+CSS, we could easily steal your mechanism for LW. Would you object?
ETA: never mind, I’ve found the source. I’m now feeling bad about using the clichéd phrase “usability nightmare”, but this would definitely be a good addition to LW.
Well, I didn’t write it in the first place, and I’d be happy to see it on LW.