[tei-council] Popups for footnotes in the Guidelines

[Martin Holmes]

Hi all,

I've been thinking for a while about a way to improve the current 
handling of footnotes in the web version of the Guidelines; if you click 
on a footnote number, you bounce down to the bottom of the page, and 
then have to bounce back up to continue reading.

Finally I've got around to a proposed improvement to this. If you go here:

<http://web.uvic.ca/~mholmes/glines_popups/html/>

you'll find a copy of the Guidelines with new functionality. If you go 
to any chapter with footnotes and click on a footnote link, you should 
see it pop up in a little box on the right of the page. I'd be 
interested in any feedback on this. Notes:

  - If JavaScript is turned off, the old behaviour remains unchanged, so 
this does not add any extra requirement for JavaScript.

  - The footnotes themselves are still there at the bottom of the page, 
unchanged; the popup just shows a copy of the target footnote. This 
means the page will still work if printed.

  - The new functionality is achieved simply by adding two tiny files, 
one JavaScript and one CSS, so it would be easy to add into the build 
process painlessly.

  - All aspects of the appearance of the popup are up for discussion; it 
currently shows up in a fixed position 25% down from the top of the 
page, on top of the other content, but it's easy to change that.

  - The little "return" arrow at the end of the footnote still works in 
the popup, so if you lose your place in the original text you can still 
get back to it in the same way,

You might find it difficult to actually locate a footnote in the text, 
so here are a couple of direct links which scroll to where footnote 
numbers exist:

<http://web.uvic.ca/~mholmes/glines_popups/html/HD.html#Note42_return>
<http://web.uvic.ca/~mholmes/glines_popups/html/TC.html#Note78_return>

Cheers,
Martin