I find it a little better when it’s footnotes you can hover over to see a pop-up with the content. But that’s just a smaller disruption, it’s still a disruption.
What I like to do when I have to is to add blocquotes starting with “Note:”. You can see a few examples of that in this post: https://mort.coffee/home/fast-interpreters/ It doesn’t do exactly the same job as footnotes but I think there are some examples there which footnote users would’ve written as a footnote.
If I used footnotes, I would want any readers who care about the footnotes to finish reading the paragraph, then go back and read the footnotes. The worst case scenario would be that a reader jumps to the footnote mid-sentence and starts reading a whole different sentence. So why not just put the content of the footnote in the next paragraph, so that I retain control of the reader’s flow?
I find it a little better when it’s footnotes you can hover over to see a pop-up with the content. But that’s just a smaller disruption, it’s still a disruption.
What I like to do when I have to is to add blocquotes starting with “Note:”. You can see a few examples of that in this post: https://mort.coffee/home/fast-interpreters/ It doesn’t do exactly the same job as footnotes but I think there are some examples there which footnote users would’ve written as a footnote.
If I used footnotes, I would want any readers who care about the footnotes to finish reading the paragraph, then go back and read the footnotes. The worst case scenario would be that a reader jumps to the footnote mid-sentence and starts reading a whole different sentence. So why not just put the content of the footnote in the next paragraph, so that I retain control of the reader’s flow?
score 1 · canonical