![]() Where footnotes put additional material in small sections at the bottom of the page, organized by number, and endnotes stuff them at the end of the document, sidenotes instead use the large unused left/right margin of the page.īecause it’s uncomfortable to read sentences which wrap from edge to edge, particularly for large widths, documents use short lines. Sidenotes and margin notes (sometimes also called “asides”) are an alternative to footnotes/endnotes in design. For heavy footnote users or users who want a drop-in, runtime Javascript-based solutions like sidenotes.js may be more useful. I review some of the available implementations.įor general users, I recommend Tufte-CSS-style approaches: it is fast & simple (using only compile-time generation of sidenotes, rendered by static HTML/CSS), popular, and Tufte-CSS-esque libraries are easy to integrate into many website workflows. ![]() Tufte-CSS has popularized the idea and since then, there has been a proliferation of slightly variant approaches. However, they are not commonly used, perhaps because web browsers until relatively recently made it hard to implement sidenotes easily & reliably. (Footnote variants, like “floating footnotes” which pop up on mouse hover, reduce the reader’s effort but don’t eliminate it.) ![]() They are particularly useful for web pages, where ‘footnotes’ are de facto endnotes, and clicking back and forth to endnotes is a pain for readers. Sidenotes/margin notes are a typographic convention which improves on footnotes & endnotes by instead putting the notes in the page margin to let the reader instantly read them without needing to refer back and forth to the end of the document (endnotes) or successive pages (footnotes spilling over). ![]()
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