[tei-council] Popups for footnotes in the Guidelines

[Martin Holmes]

Thanks Syd.

I do like the idea of pressing ESC to dismiss the box; not sure about 
the back arrow, though. The hanging indent comes directly from the 
current footnote style; I'm just cloning the footnote into the box. 
Hanging indents are notoriously tricky for CSS; the current style uses 
1em, which as you say is not wide enough for a multi-digit footnote 
number. That's something that might be solved in the XSLT when rendering 
the footnotes; you'd have to check whether any footnote number was 
double-digit, and if so, use a wider indent for all of them (because 
when they're displayed together, at the bottom of the page, they need to 
be consistent).

The width of the box is 22% of the page-width; perhaps 25% would be better?

When you click a second footnote number while another footnote is 
displayed, the first one is replaced by the second; that's not 
unreasonable, but it would be equally simple to append the second 
footnote to the box below the first. Would that be better?

Cheers,
Martin

On 13-07-29 07:56 PM, Syd Bauman wrote:
> Wow. Nice, Martin. My first reaction is that it is *much* better. I
> do appreciate the non-JS fallback, of course.
>
> A few suggested improvements:
>   * slightly wider box
>   * allow pressing ESC to dismiss the box
>   * maybe clicking back arrow should also dismiss box
>   * formatting in the box seems a bit off (hanging indent is a teeny
>     bit shy of wide enough for a single digit footnote, and not nearly
>     wide enough for a 2 digit footnote
>
> Behavior when a 2nd footnote anchor is clicked on when a box is up is
> reasonable, if not optimal. (And probably quite difficult to change,
> anyway. :-)
>
>
>> 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>