Good question. I may be misunderstanding the tech details, but the disadvantage I see with that is its linearity: like regular footnotes, it would seem to force you to do a lot of back-and-forth scrolling and would make it tough to compare what you're reading with the footnote. When I'm reading a heavily footnoted text, I usually either rip the footnotes out of the back or check out two copies so that the commentary can be compared with the primary
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you could just have target = new window to the foot note cut or anchor , and it opens in a new window, and thus still easy reference while reading the main text ?
Hm, I think that would work! Advantage: a little cleaner, easier and more consolidated. Disadvantage: no individual comments. One of the things that kind of endears this clunky system to me is that commenters can expand the footnotes almost wiki-style in a way that's easily referenced. It would be ideal if we could have it all, with commenters being able to click, say, on a word or phrase and leave a context-specific comment. But I can't think of any easy html-based way to do that without a major LJ architecture change.
or just use end notes, rather than separating them from the main text, keep it together and neat ? then you can just use lj cuts for the text = 1, 2 etc ?
It's a neat idea, but I think I agree with asciident that doing [1] or ² is probably easier and closer to the experience of writing -- and reading -- footnotes in their full intertextual glory. Although I can see your system appealing to, for example, anybody who actually made it beyond page 300 of Infinite Jest.
[1] This is the format that the ACM uses.
² This one is what, I forget now. APA? No, Chicago, I think.
As far as easier goes, absolutely. Right now it's superclunky, though it's actually faster than it seems with a couple winodws open and maybe a macro for the links.
As for the experience of reading, I do agree. Most people do the read-and-flip thing. For reasons mentioned above, I'm not particularly fond of standard ways of navigating footnotes, and they're pretty static. It might boil down to a question of whether, as you alluded to, one wants a more traditional footnoting system or a more dynamic, wiki-esque setup that allows context-based commenting. Either way, it's a high learning curve for the beginner...it would be neat if the major clients had these systems built in.
It occurs to me what we really need is a system for sidenotes. Footnotes are only really a convenience of antiquated printing technology -- and endnotes even more so -- whereas sidenotes provide for skimming or ignoring as relevant. And if we're doing that, I'm thinking that something like an start and end that that identifies that piece of text as a sidenote and then some nice CSS to put it on one side.
And because it's easier to read small vertical columns with minimal saccades anyway, it's potentially significantly *more* useful.
I'm fond of sidenotes. I used them for my Master's thesis, in a style I modified from Tufte's system in his books.
Yes! An lj tag that could manage that would be a godsend, and I think exponentially increase the amount of info people could communicate in an entry...it would also change writing habits pretty quickly; flists would start to have short, meaningful entries instead of an endless stream of too-long-to-read and cryptically-lj-cut ones.
If concurrent with that we could get a context-sensitive commenting system, LJ would come into its own as an academic tool.
spiceonice tells me that updating two journals at once, one from client and one from browser, doesn't present login conflicts. This could allow for a cleaner intermediate solution, but I'll have to experiment.
Fair enough, but I think LJ has room to grow. There's a pretty big overlap between the academic community and the personal-journal community (viz. the huge number of LJ-ers who spend free time updating wikipedia). And as far as I know, there's really no collaborative journaling system that would have anywhere near enough functionality, or a big enough user base to allow collaboration.
I'm not necessarily saying LJ needs to be massively redesigned, though if the designers ever want to throw in footnotes, that would be cool. I think someone with even just a little programming expertise could make footnotes a fairly painless procedure without changing anything about LJ. Even doing it from scratch, I can footnote entries like this with very little actual coding time.
Thanks for the pointer. Again, I'm not too concerned with making this an intrinsic part of LJ, though if that happened eventually it would be swell. I think straight-up HTML is enough to accomplish footnoting relatively cleanly (with the unfortunate exception of not being able to open new browser windows to specified size and location).
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then you can just use lj cuts for the text = 1, 2 etc ?
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[1] This is the format that the ACM uses.
² This one is what, I forget now. APA? No, Chicago, I think.
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As for the experience of reading, I do agree. Most people do the read-and-flip thing. For reasons mentioned above, I'm not particularly fond of standard ways of navigating footnotes, and they're pretty static. It might boil down to a question of whether, as you alluded to, one wants a more traditional footnoting system or a more dynamic, wiki-esque setup that allows context-based commenting. Either way, it's a high learning curve for the beginner...it would be neat if the major clients had these systems built in.
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And because it's easier to read small vertical columns with minimal saccades anyway, it's potentially significantly *more* useful.
I'm fond of sidenotes. I used them for my Master's thesis, in a style I modified from Tufte's system in his books.
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If concurrent with that we could get a context-sensitive commenting system, LJ would come into its own as an academic tool.
spiceonice tells me that updating two journals at once, one from client and one from browser, doesn't present login conflicts. This could allow for a cleaner intermediate solution, but I'll have to experiment.
Neat thesis!
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I'm not necessarily saying LJ needs to be massively redesigned, though if the designers ever want to throw in footnotes, that would be cool. I think someone with even just a little programming expertise could make footnotes a fairly painless procedure without changing anything about LJ. Even doing it from scratch, I can footnote entries like this with very little actual coding time.
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Other than that, nice color scheme.
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