[tei-council] Popups for footnotes in the Guidelines

[Martin Holmes]

On 13-07-30 05:25 AM, Syd Bauman wrote:
>> I do like the idea of pressing ESC to dismiss the box; not sure about
>> the back arrow, though.
>
> Yeah, as the "maybe" indicates, I'm not sure on the backarrow,
> either. My guess is 75% of the time I hit it, I'm going to wish the
> box disappeared. But the 25% of the time I want the box to stay, I'm
> going to be *really* annoyed that it vanished.

I've now added the escape key functionality. It works fine, except that 
in Firefox for some reason, pressing the escape key (with or without the 
popup box code) scrolls the page back up to the top. Doesn't happen in 
Chrome. Rather mysterious, but nothing to do with me. Anyway, ESC now 
dismisses the box. I don't think the back arrow should, on reflection; 
it's counter-intuitive to me. Back arrows have more to do with the page 
history.

>> The hanging indent ... 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).
>
> Yes, needs to be done in the XSLT, but why on earth should they be
> consistent at the bottom of the page? The hanging indent should by
> X+1 en spaces, where X is the number of digits in the footnote
> number. (In most all fixed-width typefaces, and in many others, the
> width of a digit is that of an N.)

In any numbered list, the indent should be consistent throughout the 
list, surely? Otherwise it looks odd. The hard thing is to make the 
numbers line up correctly; you'd have to make the footnote number a 
fixed-width inline block, and right-align it; the width of the block 
would need to be dependent on the highest number of digits in numbers in 
the list.

>> The width of the box is 22% of the page-width; perhaps 25% would be
>> better?
>
> Even more. I dunno, 33%. I've already sized my window to be a good
> reading width, of course. What happens when the footnote gets too big
> for the box is another issue involved, here.

I played around with this, and I think it looks best at 25%, which is 
what it's now set to. The box itself is not allowed to grow bigger than 
50% of the viewport height, and if necessary, the content will scroll 
within it.

>> 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?
>
> Hmmm ... hadn't thought of that. One could then build a custom
> footnote display box that had the 3rd, 4th, and 7th footnotes in it.
> Interesting idea.

Probably a bit confusing, though; and the possibility that you'd end up 
with a scrolling box, and have to scroll down to the last-added 
footnote, would grow as you clicked on more footnotes. On balance, I 
like the simplicity of replacing the old with the new.

Cheers,
Martin