Normally, a sidenote should be approximately adjacent to the in-text citation which refers to that note; in this case, sidenote #32 is pushed down, way out of the viewport, by the other sidenotes. (Hovering over a citation highlights the associated sidenote… which is, of course, useless when the sidenote is beyond the viewport’s bounds.)
My own solution (implemented for gwern.net) is what I call “slidenotes”. (They’re sidenotes that slide into view.)
An alternative solution (formerly used on gwern.net, prior to the introduction of the “slidenotes” feature) would be to check, on hover over a citation, whether the target sidenote is within the viewport; and, if it is not, to then provide the footnote popup, as if the client viewport were too narrow to display sidenotes:
Yeah, something like this is a good idea (though of course, realistically the number of posts for which this matters is very small and so not super high priority).
I’ll be honest, I hate it. I immediately looked for a way to deactivate the sidenotes or the sliding when I first tried to hover over a sidenote and the text kept moving. Probably if I didn’t really care about the stuff on gwern.net I would have probably just immediately bounced.
The post “Interstellar travel will probably doom the long-term future”, due to its high density of footnotes, works as a sort of stress-test of Less Wrong’s sidenote system. The result is decidedly not great:
(The sidenotes, they do nothing!)
Normally, a sidenote should be approximately adjacent to the in-text citation which refers to that note; in this case, sidenote #32 is pushed down, way out of the viewport, by the other sidenotes. (Hovering over a citation highlights the associated sidenote… which is, of course, useless when the sidenote is beyond the viewport’s bounds.)
My own solution (implemented for gwern.net) is what I call “slidenotes”. (They’re sidenotes that slide into view.)
For example:
(Sidenote #12 is below the viewport.)
Then, the user mouse-hovers on citation #12:
(Sidenote #12 has moved into view.)
Code for this feature (as for all gwern.net features) is, of course, available on GitHub.
An alternative solution (formerly used on gwern.net, prior to the introduction of the “slidenotes” feature) would be to check, on hover over a citation, whether the target sidenote is within the viewport; and, if it is not, to then provide the footnote popup, as if the client viewport were too narrow to display sidenotes:
Yeah, something like this is a good idea (though of course, realistically the number of posts for which this matters is very small and so not super high priority).
I’ll be honest, I hate it. I immediately looked for a way to deactivate the sidenotes or the sliding when I first tried to hover over a sidenote and the text kept moving. Probably if I didn’t really care about the stuff on gwern.net I would have probably just immediately bounced.