Usability of Footnotes

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/07/usability-of-footnotes/

by edent • 6 years ago

56 57 6 years ago

Tufte's footnotes are my favorite. They're especially brilliant when you have typeset documents on 8.5x11" paper, because you wind up with huge margins if you're using a humane line length for your main text.

https://www.overleaf.com/articles/implementing-the-teachings...

User233• 6 years ago

Tufte is underappreciated for sure. He's often aped, but rarely do I see his ideas actually applied as he teaches them. The whole point is a theory and practice of communication. Before he gave up and decided to just focus on sculpture he was almost to the point of actually developing a solid theory of representing 5-6 dimensional information representation in 2space. Of course I understand why he gave up, because 3space is way more interesting when you've solved the 2space problem to your own satisfaction.

quadrifoliate• 6 years ago

From the article:

But I want to talk about the cognitive issues at play. When footnotes can contain anything from a citation to essential background information, the user is forced to break from the flow8 of reading – often in the middle of a sentence. This is a problem in both paper books and electronic books.

I think this is...the idea of footnotes? That you don't break the flow and it's safe to skip over them, but if you're coming back for a leisurely read later, you can look them up and see what you missed. [1] When you go over the text a second time, you can follow the references to the footnotes and see the interesting crumbs that the author laid out, which often lead to a train of thought separate from the main flow of words.

------------

[1] At least, this is how I have used footnotes for a while when reading, and it works quite well. YMMV, since people read and comprehend differently.

edent2• 6 years ago

I think my confusion is about how to read the footnotes which are more than just citations. If I read them "inline" then I don't understand why they're not part of the main text. If I wait until the end of the chapter, I've lost context.

I'm prepared to believe that I haven't been taught to read in the right way. But there seems to be some disagreement on what the right way is.

ringshall• 6 years ago

Same idea with parentheses, at least I understand them.

hardwaregeek• 6 years ago

I find footnotes annoying even in print books. When I'm reading a book, I have to figure out if the book is the type that uses footnotes as citations or the type that uses it as actual content. Or worse, the type that does both. If it's the type that uses them as citations, then meh, I can skip over them. If it's the type that uses them as content, well ugh now I need to read this footnote and then get back to the original text, which is a context switch. Even worse if the footnotes are actually endnotes because then I need to physically flip the pages. Even worse if the endnotes are gigantic and have subnotes (cough Infinite Jest).

If it's the type that does both then I have to look at every damn footnote only to be disappointed by a "Pfaffenberger, 2016" 90% of the time.

I don't have a good answer to these problems. Tufte style is better because I don't have to move my eyes that much. But there's only so much one can put in a note in the margin. And it still distracts.

User233• 6 years ago

I like endnotes best. For a book where they are actually useful I either unbind or buy two copies so I can lay out the endnotes side by side with the book. Think of it like having two monitors where one is the working screen and the other is the reference screen.

JadeNB2• 6 years ago

Wouldn't it be more useful not to have to do this? Keeping them footnotes saves buying another copy, or damaging yours.

cafard2• 6 years ago

Or you can just use two bookmarks.

pottertheotter• 6 years ago

I agree. I read best with physical books, so don't bother with ebooks anymore. But it's frustrating to have to constantly flip to the end of a chapter or the end of a book to figure out if a footnote is of interest to me.

I think academic papers largely get this right. First, footnotes and references are separated. Second, footnotes are actual footnotes at the foot of the corresponding page.

JadeNB2• 6 years ago

Some disciplines don't separate them, using footnotes as references (but I think all would be improved if they did separate them).

senkora• 6 years ago

Footnotes and endnotes are definitely much more usable on an e-reader. That's how I read Infinite Jest (and most other books) and I sympathize with anyone who tried to read that in physical form.

just-ok2• 6 years ago

Footnotes are great when done right.

If you're using footnotes to cite things, you're doing it wrong: inline citations exist. If that's not enough for you, use a different syntax (say, ^[1] instead of ^1). If you're using it to define terms, you're doing it wrong: use a margin note. If that's not enough, you should probably typeset a nice box that makes definitions easy to identify. Footnotes (imo, of course) should only be used as a "here's more information for the curious" and should similarly only appear at the actual foot of a page (I despise endnotes).

My experience is biased towards print and print-like (PDF) use of footnotes, but I don't think it's much of a problem to expect users to click every footnote when provided with a convenient pop-up UI like in the OP, provided that you've clearly defined a convention or pattern of their usage to your readers.

I do wish websites showed footnotes on hover, though... jumping within the page is nonsense and often mucks with URL sharing.

barryvan2• 6 years ago

Footnotes _are_ great when done right, but I have to say that inline citations are incredibly frustrating as a reader, because they're harder to skip over. A footnote marker is small enough that your eye can continue over it, whereas a citation like (Just-OK 2020) is much harder to read.

My personal preference is to use footnotes as you suggest -- as a "here's more information for the curious" option -- whereas citations should be linked to a "references" section -- either at the end of the chapter or the book or the overall article.

abnercoimbre• 6 years ago

[...] a "references" section -- either at the end of the chapter or the book or the overall article.

So footnotes retain the numbering system (1, 2, 3, etc.) throughout the chapter text, but how would you mark sentences for whom a reference is available?

just-ok2• 6 years ago

That’s definitely true, re: inline citations getting in the way. When I typeset, I typically have citations use the ^[1] form I described above (like on Wikipedia) to alleviate this, and typically also use a lighter font color to make them easier to ignore.

stdbrouw• 6 years ago

Yet if the only use for footnotes is to house whatever the author just couldn't bear to part with, even when that information doesn't contribute to the overal thrust of the argument, then endnotes are precisely the right solution: through their location they indicate to the reader that really they shouldn't bother to read them unless they absolutely want to. Footnotes are in-your-face and communicate the idea that actually they're a part of the body copy in disguise.

dredmorbius6• 6 years ago

IMO inline cites are the worst of all possible worlds: they butcher the text but don't provide enough information to resolve the citation and require another two levels of lookup (brief-ref mapping, referenced work) to resolve the reference.

Either just name the damned work already in the text ("as Smith writes in Academic Observations (1972) ..."), or use a numbered note and cite the work fully or partially. Any decent bibliographic tool (LaTeX + BibTex) can handle long vs. short cites, and your reader will thank you. For any sufficient volume of references, footnotes are the only sensible tool.

There's also the silent notes form (unsure of the proper name) common in serious-but-nonacademic works --- no indictation in the main text but page-referenced notes with anchoring context. This solves one problem (interrupting the main text), but introduces another (failing to sufficiently notice additional references or comments).

ghaff2• 6 years ago

I agree. For citations in non-academic/legal writing, IMO it's best to name the source in the text in an informal way, as you say, and then probably use end-notes. The exact form doesn't really matter as long as the detail is out of the way because very few readers will ever see it.

That said, I do miss the fact that the form of footnotes on the printed page doesn't translate well to ebooks (except for PDFs on tablets) and HTML. I used to write IT industry research and our general style was fairly conversational. We tended to use footnotes a fair bit for things like:

- Bulletproofing. ("Yes, we know there some exceptions to the statement we just made like A, B, C but their edge cases that aren't really relevant to our central argument.)

- Short historical digressions that would drop the reader out of the flow.

- Short background that most readers probably know but just in case someone doesn't

And so forth. I do still feel like I've had a stylistic tool taken away given that I have to increasingly write knowing that I can't depend on having easy to scan footnotes at the bottom of the page and clicking through is way too obtrusive for the manner I usually use footnotes.

rocqua2• 6 years ago

Personally, I like my citations short and meaningful. Easy to skip over, but also easy to resolve if I care. That means something like [Aut19] where Aut is some contraction of the author names, and 19 reffers to the year of publication.

My issue with simpler citations like [13] is that it is hard to figure out whether two citations are to the same book. "Was [13] that reference to the horrible tome of complete mathematics, or was that [14]" "Was [15] the paper this is trying to generalize?". By creating a small amount of meaning, it becomes much easier to remember the actual reference.

My issue with longer citations, is that I generally don't care about the source of a statement. When I am trying to follow an argument, I will just take the statement as fact, and focus on the big picture. Only when the fact is surprising, or when I have gotten the big picture, will I care about the reference. By having full inline citations in the argument, the text of the argument gets very bloated. Making it much harder to get the high level point of the argument.

I can imagine this is a feature of very technical, close to mathematical proofs, kind of texts. For other fields, maybe this matter much less. Especially when 'truth' is a lot less objective, knowing the source of a statement becomes more important I guess.

sixstringtheory4• 6 years ago

Before even clicking through to the article I was thinking about Infinite Jest.

As an author, I want to add more details which don’t fit in the main body of the text. Because I hate deleting text and my editor told me to take it out.

I joked about IJ doing that exact thing, that the editor was all “no, you can’t just list nonsensical film titles for four straight pages” and DFW said “watch this.”

Of course it’s us poor readers that pay the price having to use two bookmarks (or three, as some footnotes have footnotes). And there was plenty of this:

the user is forced to break from the flow of reading

I’ve never had to reread so many passages. If you take it all in stride it’s quite fun, really. I found it humorous and chuckled each time I had to skip to the back, like I was privy to an inside joke.

The article does raise good points, and I’ve never used an e-reader. I bet it helps a ton, I imagine something like the pop up doc/diff/def viewers like in a modern source code editor. I imagine it would’ve taken away some of the fun from IJ, but of course that’s not a typical case.

codetrotter• 6 years ago

I tried to read Infinite Jest once but eventually gave up because I found it kind of exhausting to read and I couldn’t really follow along.

After reading your comment I decided to have another look at it. I knew last time that it was a weird book, and that it was enjoyed by a lot of people. But even looking at the first page of it again I just don’t feel compelled to read it. Maybe some day.

1MachineElf• 6 years ago

There's a decent audiobook too, if that helps.

sixstringtheory4• 6 years ago

I hear you. It took me around 2 years to finish, with a few other books interspersed as breaks from it. There were many nights in bed where I didn’t make it through a single whole page before passing out.

In the end I came away from it more with a feeling I had lived a part of life in another person’s (really several peoples’) shoes, less that there was any particular climactic aha! moment. Life, as wonderful as it is, still has its banalities and mundanities. You’re not missing out on a great truth, just a quirky story. Plenty of those to go around. Hope you find a good one!

bschne2• 6 years ago

DFW is notorious for this, in his non-fiction essays he goes on so many tangents within the main text already, often only to then go off on yet another tangent in an almost page-long footnote.

Funny thing is he sort of parodied himself by going all out in his 2005 piece "Host" [1] by going so far as to nest footnotes within each other. That piece is actually interesting to compare across different media, as the interactivity of the web version makes it somewhat elegant to look at or skip the footnotes at the reader's discretion, whereas in the print edition in "Consider the Lobster", they are put in boxes within the main text and connected by arrows.

It takes a great deal of concentration/"work" to read his stuff but when you're in the right frame of mind all the depths and semi-related thoughts can make it all the more interesting...

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/host/30...

sixstringtheory4• 6 years ago

It sounds a lot like Proust too, I’m about 1/3rd of the way through Swann’s Way, which I haven’t picked up in months now, too long. He takes tangent to the next level, not only in duration but in frequency, and the sentence length! It’s like reading a free-associative depth first search of the guy’s memories.

maaark• 6 years ago

I can't believe he wrote a whole article on the usability of footnotes, using footnotes, on a site without links to return from the footnote back to where it was used.

dmurray• 6 years ago

The browser back button works, at least for me.

edent2• 6 years ago

I'm being deliberately ironic to help underscore how usability issues affect footnotes.

dredmorbius6• 6 years ago

...There have been many attempts to get a <footnote> element into HTML...

HTML is now well into its 2nd quarter century, grew from academic origins, and yet still lacks a <footnote> or <note> element and standard presentation(s).¹ I've not followed developments at all closely, references here are based on current DDG searches, bit so far as I'm aware, the situation's not improved and has arguable regressed.

Suggestions to use <cite> fail as not all footnotes are citations. Using <aside> overloads the element, creates ambiguities as to usage, and leaves us with nonstandard footnote mechanisms.

There was a 2003 proposal for a <referral> tag which seems ... excessively Byzantine.²

David MacDonald's <note> element proposal seems to cover most of the features (and objections) I'd anticipate.³

I'd consider footnotes (bottom of current page), endnotes (end of document or section/chaper/article), sidenotes (margin adjacent to text), inline notes (parenthetical communts, such aas this), or pop-up dialogues to be for the most part implementation details of an underlying notes element. An author might specify a default presentation, but the reader or device / media properties could override this in all cases to suit needs, limitations, or preference.

________________________________

Notes:

1. HTML3 had the <FN> element, long since abandoned: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/footnotes.html

2. https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003May/att-0...

3. https://www.davidmacd.com/blog/html51-footnotes.html See also http://spec-ops.github.io/html-note/index.html

apetresc• 6 years ago

Suggestions to use <cite> fail as not all footnotes are citations. Using <aside> overloads the element, creates ambiguities as to usage, and leaves us with nonstandard footnote mechanisms.

I agree with all of your conclusions except this one. You appear to be contradicting yourself. How does <aside> overload the element? It does the opposite, by semantically separating <cite>s from mere textual notes and letting the client present the two however the user wants. I agree that within each category, it should be up to the presentation layer whether they are popups or footnotes or endnotes or just hidden altogether, but the distinction between citations and notes is an important one that can't be easily inferred. So what's the problem?

dredmorbius6• 6 years ago

An aside might be something other than a note.

Cite is a subset of notes.

Aside is ... at best a superset, if not something independent.

If you want uniform styling or behaviour, you'd need to distinguish aside notes from other asides, meaning page- and site-specific conventions, and no uniform and predictable practice.

Notes are sufficiently well defined and utilised that they deserve a dedicated element.

bryanrasmussen2• 6 years ago

Does footnote (bottom of current page) in html mean bottom of viewport or bottom of webpage that when printed out can take 4-5 pages. If bottom of webpage what is footnote if infinite scroll.

In the MDN example for cite it is inside of a footer element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ci...

I believe a combination of aside, cite, and footer can achieve most of what is wanted - at any rate the main problem is that footnote is a concept arising from printed works and perhaps not directly transferable to the infinite canvas that HTML in the browser represents.

on edit: minor clarification.

dredmorbius6• 6 years ago

"Footer" is a page/section element, not an in-text document relation. Footnotes are document or article relations, similar to sections or figures. The refer between the main text and supplemental material, with enumeration.

Again, how the note itself is presented should be definable by the author/publisher, media, device, or user, ranked from least to greatest priority.

Whilst infinite scroll is a misfeature, most such designs are based around subunits, usually articles. Notes at the end of an article, much as they typically appear in printed anthologies, encyclopedias, and collections, would seem a fairly obvious choice.

ghaff2• 6 years ago

perhaps not directly transferable

Yes, I think that's the general problem. On the printed page (or a digital facsimile of one), footnotes work well because a reader can almost effortlessly redirect their eyes to the bottom of the page and tell at a glance if the footnote is something they care about and want to absorb. Clicking on links, flipping to the bottom of a long page, etc. is far more effort and pretty much defeats the purpose of many types of footnotes.

gsnedders• 6 years ago

1. HTML3 had the <FN> element, long since abandoned: https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/footnotes.html

Less abandoned and more just a complete lack of HTML3 implementation. HTML3 was in some ways an early "spec from an ivory tower", and implementers essentially wrote HTML 3.2 in its place. That said, many of the ideas in HTML3 later came to fruition.

dredmorbius6• 6 years ago

Fair enough. The presence of the element was unknown to me until I'd written my comment, and I'm not fully straight on all the twists and kinks in the evolution of HTML, other than vaguely recalling that XHTML was Right Out.

nsmog767• 6 years ago

One of the best uses of footnotes is in Softwar, the book on Ellison & Oracle. There, footnotes are an entertaining editorial compromise: the author refused to give up final approval, but he gave Ellison the right to respond within the book.

Ellison will either expand on - or contradict - the author's points. Easily the most appropriate and defensible use of footnotes I've ever encountered.

Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AK78QVI/

impendia• 6 years ago

I skimmed through part of it and found this gem in a footnote:

"LE writes: Gardens last for hundreds of years, companies don't. That's because people love and take care of gardens."

simonebrunozzi• 6 years ago

Interesting. What's the main takeaway of the book?

rimliu• 6 years ago

The worst case I had to deal with was when reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I can read Russian, that's not a problem. The problem is that about 20% is in French which I cannot read, and translation was given as footnotes. So annoying.

r34• 6 years ago

The worst thing ever is end-book-notes (or end-chapter ones) in a paper book. I have the habit of "precise reading", e.g. I usually read books from first to last page without skipping information. The "end-notes rich" books are the worst reading experience for me (bottom page foot-notes are OK).

When I write text I quite often use footnotes - they are special for the organisation of the text, adding kind of additional dimensions to the main narration.

I don't (or very rarely) use ebooks, so hard to tell.

bschne2• 6 years ago

I personally like the approach that Gwern takes (e.g. [1]), which works fairly well on screens where you have a lot more horizontal space than needed for the main body of text (it's beneficial to keep the text somewhat narrow anyway, since lines that are too long become harder to scan/read).

It seems to be somewhat similar to what Edward Tufte does in his books, which is also putting the footnotes in the margins close to where they are brought up, and often even interrupting the current line for an additional note or image at the point of reference.

1. https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3

cxr• 6 years ago

I personally like the approach that Gwern takes (e.g. [1]), which works fairly well on screens where you have a lot more horizontal space

I do almost all my reading and general browsing on half-width windows (side note: I highly recommend this practice), but sometimes I break out a tab into its own window and maximize it for pages that don't play nice at half-width. Gwern's footnotes break if you ever transition from a full-width window and then drop down to half-width. (Whereas if you start at half-width and keep it that way, they work as intended.)

gwern• 6 years ago

More info: https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes

rocqua2• 6 years ago

I have often used footnotes in my own reading. For things I want in the text for completeness, but do not consider essential to the story.

However, thinking about it, they are completely nonfunctional for me when reading. Unless I am skimming a text, I will immediately look up any foot-note I come across. I suppose that, if it is a quick explanation of something I already know, or don't care about, it is easier to skip the footnote in full. Whereas an in-line explanation is harder to skip because it is part of the text.

jeremiahlee• 6 years ago

Nice to see Coil icon light up. The author just earned $0.02 from me because of their Web Monetization tag.

WorldMaker• 6 years ago

How does the user know whether the footnote is a citation or is explanatory?

Used to be that was one of the distinctions between footnotes and end notes. This is an affordance where that lost distinction in ebooks is most felt, I think.

An equally old practice, however, is to use different marks for footnotes versus end notes, and that's something I've felt could be readopted in a digital context. In particular the asterisk, dagger, double dagger, very rare triple dagger symbology was used for foot notes only (as there are only a few such symbols, versus numerals, and they can't be "document global").

In a medium with hyperlinks, symbol uniqueness is less of a problem so asterisks for all footnotes and numbers for end notes is possible.

Similarly, we aren't as limited typographically with what metal we have available in ebooks, we could enlist a much wider variety of symbols (emoji notes, perhaps?), or even pair symbols and numbers.

Perhaps the biggest thing holding us back right now is that publishers want to use the same design tools for both print and ebook (for good reason), but ideas like increasing symbol variety or pairing symbols and numbers are both reasonable options to make it to print as well if they need to be kept close in similarity for ease of production.

zeveb• 6 years ago

Footnotes are great! There's something wonderful about the affordance of a digressive paragraph at the foot of the page. I do not need to break the flow of reading, just flick my eyes down, read and return to the body text. What are terrible are endnotes, which force one to page or click back and forth. That action breaks flow.

I wonder if the issue is with how footnotes are displayed electronically? Perhaps a Sufficiently Smart E-Reader could display a footnote as long as its footnote marker, sentence, line or paragraph (would need research to see which is best, I think) is on-screen.

Usability of Footnotes

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