Footnote Trouble
Footnotes are challenging for me, no matter how interested I am in their content.
I realized this years ago while reading my first Chuck Klosterman book, which frequently used endnotes for tangents from the main thrust of the story. I enjoy a good sidebar, but in the process of flipping to the end of the chapter and locating the note, I’d forget its original context. After a few attempts and a lot of re-reading to try and get my bearings, I decided to skip those sections.
In print, endnotes (which display at the end of a chapter or section) differ from footnotes. Footnotes appear at the bottom of the same page as the associated passage. Assuming you aren’t holding the page too close to your face, you can see the note and its context at the same time… no page-flipping required.
Web pages can be any size, so footnotes there tend to work the same as endnotes in print. Readers must pogo stick between superscripted links and a consolidated list of notes below the main content.
This works fine for citations and brief definitions, stuff that’s short and self-contained. But for longer tangents, sidebars or commentary, there’s something about the separation of note and context that hits an invisible reset button in my brain. Put simply, it’s a pain for me to read.
One could argue this isn’t a big deal: If the note was essential, it’d be in the main text. Fair enough… I suppose that’s the author’s prerogative. Personally, if a reader shows interest in my content but the formatting gets in their way, I consider that a design failure. So I recently resolved to avoid writing them unless their use is dictated by a style guide or I’m really confident they’re the best tool for the job.
I’m far from the first to have strong opinions on footnotes. In The Footnote: A Curious History, Anthony Grafton documents literal centuries of divisiveness. In the 2000s, John Gruber defended his footnotes as others wrote bookmarklets to enhance them. The Atlantic published The Technology of a Better Footnote in 2012, celebrating popover “fixes” popularized by Bigfoot and the work of Marco Arment.
(I put “fixes” in quotes as popovers obscure surrounding content and may contribute to what Kate Moran calls overlay overload.)
Love, hate or ignore them, footnotes on the web seem here to stay. They’re a staple of Wikipedia (and wikis in general). They’re built into WordPress and seemingly anything that extends Markdown. It’s probably a fool’s errand to caution against their overuse.
But now that HTML has dedicated elements for asides and disclosure widgets, with better CSS for side notes on the horizon, I hope we’ll see more variety in how we present nuggets of tangential content. Why should print designers have all the fun?
Otherwise, I’ll just have to hope for parentheses to make a big comeback.