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

This seems like one of those things that you would have thought of already, but I haven't been able to find any comments about it anywhere.

It would be Really Cool[tm] if one could click the superscript and be whisked down the page to the footnote, and vice versa. It seems to me this wouldn't be too hard to add to the footnote generation code...

-N.

I had actually thought of that (no really). The only slight problem is the the footnotes are so small they might be difficult to click on, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be done. I also thought about making the footnotes pop up when you move the mouse over them. Maybe I'll add both features sometime.

Both would be peachy...

I think pop-ups would be the best for short notes. But if you do a DNA footnote (wraps around two pages) that might be a Bad Idea.

My suggestion for a pop-up footnote window would be to put all the footnotes on a single page with the pop-up being a "window" into that page. (As opposed to displaying a single footnote in a window.) This would give the user the ability to browse all the footnotes at once, if desired. The correct footnote can be linked to with a '#' link (e.g. http://www.h2g2.com/A123456#F1, &c.). At the same time, it must be simple for the reader to dismiss the footnote window.

Of course, this scheme also requires a separate entry in the database for the footnotes for each entry. I'm not sure how expensive that is.

I keep coming back to the simplicity of embedding links to the footnotes and the footnotes themselves on the same page with the entry. Though I'm not familiar with H2G2's internals, it seems to me it would be simple to implement (less work for Jim ), and simple to use.

-N.

We could do a JavaScript popup window with the stuff in: looks like a generic windows dialog box. Or mac, if that's what you are using. And it's fairly simple too.

I rather like the way they've turned out, though I do have one question. In many of the tooltips (for the footnotes) I see an odd character (designated by blocks or double bold vertical lines at odd places. I was wondering what character that might be.. I see it in some of mine, and I know of no character I've placed in the footnote itself.

'Nonnie

Probably a linefeed/carriage return or similar. Tooltips have different rules about handling linefeeds, so you should probably avoid using a return in a footnote.

Oye.. in the code itself... I never thought of that.

'Nonnie