RE: Re(4): But what about the FOOTNOTES???

[larry.kollar@xxxxxxxxxx]

Gaylin Walli wrote: (butchered to get to the point)

> Footnotes, you see, are a by-product of the printing press
> industry .... Rather than simply allow users to add information
> that simply could not be added last minute to the text...,
> footnotes have evolved into something that allows authors
> maintain the logical or emotional flow of a text, yet
> still include information vital to the user's full experience.

> Just the same, could we get back to talking about FrameMaker
> please?

That's really funny when you think about it: footnotes were
invented to work around a limitation of mechanical printing
press technology -- and now we have an electronic publishing
tool (Frame)[1] that doesn't handle footnotes well!

In a lot of cases, writers misuse footnotes -- like I did
in the previous paragraph[2] -- to add parenthetical asides.
I know academics are wedded to their footnotes, and they're
usually using formatters like TeX that do a good job with
footnotes anyway, but how do people use footnotes outside
of academia?


One could argue that footnotes are becoming irrelevant. Take
HTML, for example -- no footnote capability. You can use
JavaScrud to make little popups or tooltips, reformat as
endnotes, or (my favorite) render them as blockquotes
directly following the paragraph referencing them. Any way
you slice it, it's a workaround. In an XML publishing tool
like Frame 7, you can include parenthetical asides and render
them in-line with the text, or as sidenotes, or even (with
limitations) as footnotes. Define an <aside> element and
worry about the formatting later.

Thus, maybe it's time to get away from footnotes. In my
line of work, I haven't used them in years (except to
be silly like I did in this message). I wasn't aware that
footnotes were originally a kludge for inserting last-
minute additions into a typeset document -- today, if the
info in question isn't important enough to include at the
point that you reference it, maybe it shouldn't be in the
document anyway.


[1] YADATROT (Yet Another Desperate Attempt To Remain On Topic)
[2] Deliberately, to make a point. Oops, I did it again.
--
Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS
"Content creators are the engine that drives
value in the information life cycle."
    -- Barry Schaeffer, on XML-Doc



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