Citationsn in Web Documents

November 15, 2004 11:26 AM

This site (and the complementary paper) tackles the pervasive problem of annotating web documents with footnotes and citations. There are some smart ideas, but I'm still not satisfied (more inside)...

All of the 9 solutions on that site, IMO, are deficient. Endnoting, with anchors to and from the footnote, is incredibly distracting. Third party solutions like Flash are cumbersome and don't allow for copy/paste and other text manipulation. PDFs are unfriendly and non-interactive. The "cleanest" solution is DHTML pop-ups, but these only last as long as your mouse is over the footnote and as such won't translate to a printed document. Moreover, the pop-up concept is good only for brief citations. Legal writing, in particular, is dependent on cross-references, and footnotes in legal documents often exceed the length of the main text.

Can anyone come up with better ideas by which footnote-laden academic and legal work can be displayed in a low-impact, printable web environment? (Think Metafilter, for instance.)

posted by PrinceValium to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

I think variants of this question have been posted before -- once by me. I share your pain.

Here's what I would like: a system which would allow you to post a text document, and then the system would reformat the document so that there was a subtle link by each line of text. If you want to make an annotation, you click on the link. You are then taken to a form that allows you to click any word in the line. Which would allow you to attach an annotation on the word-by-word level.

After you (or someone else) add an annotation to a word, that word becomes an unobtrusive hyperlink in the main document. By "unobtrusive," I mean that it's formatted in a way that makes it just slightly different from the surrounding text -- just enough to think about if you want to think about it.

Rolling over the link would tell you how many annotations have been added to that word. Clicking the link would display the annotation(s).

Finally, there should be many options for annotation display. I would like a frame option (though I normally detest frames), a footnote option, a rollover options, etc.

And it would be nice to have some other options, such as the ability to edit your previous annotations, comment on other people's annotations in a threaded discussion, and get a list of recently added annotations.

Okay, who is going to build this for me :-)
posted by grumblebee at 12:55 PM on November 15, 2004

put the footnotes inline and hide them. have them slide out when clicked or hovered. better yet, put them in at the end (source-code wise) and use CSS positioning to drop them inline when needed, and use a print stylesheet that will leave them visible at the end of the article for printing. older browsers should be left to display them at the end of the article by default.

done correctly, they can still be hotlinked - use a direct href to the footnote, and a javascript onclick call to capture mouse hits and execute some DHTML code to make the footnote appear inline in modern browsers.

similar in method to some CSS dropdown menus or cascading lists...
posted by caution live frogs at 12:57 PM on November 15, 2004

Here's what I would like: a system which would allow you to post a text document, and then the system would reformat the document so that there was a subtle link by each line of text. If you want to make an annotation, you click on the link. You are then taken to a form that allows you to click any word in the line. Which would allow you to attach an annotation on the word-by-word level.

This describes something a lot like a wiki. In particular, you might be interested in the use of DHTML in
tiddlywiki. Unfortunately this wiki has no backend and the saving mechanism is very clunky, but the microcontent model of annotation is quite impressive (and so is its implementation).
posted by advil at 2:06 PM on November 15, 2004

Interesting article; I've passed it on to some of my co-workers. We had to tackle this issue earlier this year. Our final solution was a hidden layer that would display the entire set of notes when the user hovered over a link. The link was not the actual asterisk/number/etc, but a couple of words at the bottom of the text. Not as elegant and useful as linking every asterisk, but served the purpose.
posted by lychee at 2:19 PM on November 15, 2004