h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am one of those who basically stumbled and blundered his way into an understanding of how footnotes work here. One of the things I noticed is that when reading an entry offline, footnotes still work in MS Internet Explorer, but there is a problem when I use a 'thin' browser such as OffByOne (which I often like to in spite of its limitations). Something to do with Java? But I digress.

I don't necessarily agree that if a footnote is longer than can be read in five seconds it should be in the main body text. I find that five seconds is an arbitrary and rather short time-slot (maybe I should learn to read and understand faster?) and it's often quite appropriate that a technical explanation or comment that is as long as this paragraph, or even a bit longer, should be in a footnote so as not to disrupt the flow of the main text, or bore those who don't require the explanation.