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

'About Tastes-matters not (A)-thing-worthy-of-dispute-are.'

Sounds like Yoda.

Anyhow, a great entry. Actually makes me feel hungry reading it.

>>could you please try and incorporate 20), 23) and perhaps 25) into the body?

Are you absolutely sure? 20 - conceivably. But 23 and 25 are so tangential that they really won't fit into the text. The only alternative would be to delete them entirely - which I don't want to do.

I'd also argue that weaving in 20 would make the entry lutefisk-heavy.

Thousand Year eggs lead to student flat arguments

We had a chinese girl in a uni flat who kept here 100 year eggs int he kitchen and as well as looking unhealth, they stunk the place out. Very soon they ended up thrown away by the reat of our flat for sanity reasons

I shared a flat with a guy who ate fried sprats with rice for breakfast. Oddly, it was the smell of the cooking rice that I found hardest to stomach.

Are there any more thoughts on this? Is my stubborn refusal to countenance absorbing a few footnotes still holding it up?

(I can budge on one of them, if need be).

Edward I like those particular footnotes as they are. They are, as you say, tangential.

Pimms (that is my anyway)

Maybe a statement at the start saying
"This entry has a lot of footnotes. To avoid the distraction of having to scroll, just point at them without clicking and some text will pop up"

Or would sensible, context-relevant user guidance be setting a dangerous h2g2 precedent?

Unfortunately I think the 'pop up text' is only a feature in *some* browsers, so you can't be dogmatic about how someone else's browser will treat footnotes.

Correct!

I use the Mozilla Firefox browser. Only the first line of the footnote appears floating beside the cursor when I hover over the footnote number. If there is more than one line, the first line ends in ...

Ah well...it would have been a messy compromise anyway.

Any of you Scouts aware of the status of this? Are the eds insisting that I budge? I could weave the lutefisk anecdote in, if that would help

However...having read one of the entries on today's front page, I've had to modify my Ghandi reference and now it's even more tangential.

The entry's status is that it is back in Peer Review and pickable by a Scout.

(There is a button on PR entries that only a Scout can see that says "Recommend this Entry". When pushed up comes a pop-up box where the Scout writes why they want to recommend the entry - this is the status of your entry as of now. If an entry has already been recommended, but not taken out of PR by the Eds and forwarded on to the Subs, the pop-up box says that the entry has already been recommended.)

As to where you go with this entry. I don't get what the Eds are going on about.

They can't be having a go because it has too many footnotes. They've only asked for three of the 27 to be incorporated in the main text. So that's just a reduction from 'an awful lot of footnotes' to 'almost as many as before'.

Assuming that footnotes 20, 23 and 25 are the same three footnotes that the Eds are having an issue with. I tend to agree with what you've said about the difficulty of incorporating them into the body of the text. Thus we are at an impasse.

My advice is that this get re-scouted with your explanation as to why you disagree with the incorporation of the three footnotes. I have in the past seen entries where the Eds have queried something and the author has then disagreed with them, get accepted because they have now got that clarification from the author.

Any volunteers, scouts? (He asked, arrogantly).

Mine are not up for a couple of weeks at least

indeed

Okay, so I'm a bit of a latecomer, but I had to stop in and say I LOVE this! I really hope the eds see the error of their ways.

In my browser (don't know if this is true in all browsers, but could present a solution) when I hover over a footnote not only does it show the footnote but it is also a link to where the footnote is at the bottom of the page. Clicking on it automatically scrolls to the bottom of the page, and clicking my browser's 'Back' button takes me back to the place I was reading before the footnote.

I found one incomplete sentence, the first one under the last header: "...they should not be regarded as an unhealthy."

This is a real 5-star effort .

All footnotes in h2g2 are implemented as links, so clicking on the footnote number should always bring you down to the footnote and clicking on Back should bring you back, no matter what the browser. But it is this jumping up and down that the eds don't like, and I agree with them. Edward's problem is that he tries to put everything he knows into each entry, rather than just writing another entry on the subject.

The eds presumably objected to those particular three footnotes because they are far bigger than the others. I think Edward should be let away it this time, with a sharp slap on the back of the hand and as long as he promises not to do it again.

Consider me censured!

On a related topic: Is there any GuideML that lets us put in internal links - as per HTML #REFs?

It wouldn't necessarily be a good thing all over the place - but I'd quite like one at the start of another entry: A3059697 , for ethical reasons.

There does not seem to be any way of doing links within an entry. I asked the eds about it a few years back and they didn't know of any way. So unless it has been introduced since, I think you are out of luck.

On the tangentionality (?) issue - I've always been inspired by a line from the film Ghandi, where he is stopped on the way to a meeting by British officers who enquire as to the topic of his speech:

"I shall be speaking on the benefits of goat's milk in the daily diet. In the course of this I shall, naturally, be refering to the iniquities of British rule."