styling footnotes a la Chicago/Turabian

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Haines Brown - 30 Oct 2005 23:32 GMT

At present I style my footnotes as follows:

.note {
vertical-align: super;
font-size: smaller;
padding-right: 2px;
}


<a name="N1" class="note">1</a>
 <note text>


However, it would be nice to use the OL element so that the footnotes
are automatically numbered in sequence. To do this:

ol li{vertical-align: super; font-size: smaller;}
li p{vertical-align: sub; font-size: larger;}

<ol>
<li>note text</li>
<li>note text</li>
</ol>

The problem with this is that the numbers are followed by periods. Is
there any way to get rid of the periods so that the number is
immediately followed by the footnote text?

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Haines Brown
KB1GRM

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Jukka K. Korpela - 30 Oct 2005 23:58 GMT

> At present I style my footnotes as follows:

How do you make footnotes work in the first place. They basically don't.
Endnotes or links work much better on the Web as it is now.

> .note {
> vertical-align: super;
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
> <note text>
>

The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed., clause 16.25) recommends that
footnote numbers be written as normal numbers, not superscript.

On the web, a footnote reference and a footnote should normally be linked
to each other both ways. For reasons and techniques, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/fn.html
I mention this because making a footnote number a link is yet another
reason to make it appear in normal font, not as superscript.

> However, it would be nice to use the OL element so that the footnotes
> are automatically numbered in sequence.

I doubt that. It would defeat the linking idea (or at least its natural
implementation). Moreover, you still have to keep track of the numbers in
the footnote references.

> The problem with this is that the numbers are followed by periods. Is
> there any way to get rid of the periods so that the number is
> immediately followed by the footnote text?

No. Browsers aren't really _supposed_ to put periods after the list item
numbers they generate, but they actually do, and they don't give us a way
to prevent that.

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Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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Haines Brown - 31 Oct 2005 04:55 GMT

Thank you for the useful reply.

>> At present I style my footnotes as follows:

> How do you make footnotes work in the first place. They basically
> don't. Endnotes or links work much better on the Web as it is now.

Sorry. My error. Meant "endnotes".

>> .note {
>> vertical-align: super;
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
> The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed., clause 16.25) recommends that
> footnote numbers be written as normal numbers, not superscript.

That's true and why I specified "Turabian" in my subject
line. Turabian is a varient of the Chicago style sheet.

> On the web, a footnote reference and a footnote should normally be
> linked to each other both ways.

I do that, but left it out for simplification here. I read your
interesting paper, but don't need the brackets because I name the note
NN and the link back RN.

>> However, it would be nice to use the OL element so that the
>> footnotes are automatically numbered in sequence.

>> The problem with this is that the numbers are followed by
>> periods. Is there any way to get rid of the periods so that the
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> item numbers they generate, but they actually do, and they don't
> give us a way to prevent that.

Well, so much for my ambition ;-)

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Haines Brown
KB1GRM

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Webmaster Forum / HTML, CSS, Scripts / CSS / October 2005

styling footnotes a la Chicago/Turabian