So, Jake Archibald wrote that we should "give footnotes the boot", and... I do not wholly agree. So, here are some arguments against, or at least perpendicular to. Whether this is in grateful thanks of or cold-eyed revenge about him making me drink a limoncello and Red Bull last week can remain a mystery.
Commentary about footnotes on the web tends to boil down into two categories: that they're foot, and that they're notes. Everybody1 agrees that being foot is a problem. Having a meaningless little symbol in some text which you then have to scroll down to the end of a document to understand is stupid. But, and here's the point, nobody does this. Unless a document on the web was straight up machine-converted from its prior life as a printed thing, any "footnotes" therein will have had some effort made to conceptually locate the content of the footnote inline with the text that it's footnoting. That might be a link which jumps you down to the bottom, or it might be placed at the side, or it might appear inline when clicked on, or it might appear in a popover, but the content of a "footnote" can be reached without your thread of attention being diverted from the point where you were previously2.
He's right about the numbers3 being meaningless, though, and that they're bad link text; the number "3" gives no indication of what's hidden behind it, and the analogy with "click here" as link text is a good one. We'll come back to this, but it is a correct objection.
What is a footnote, anyway?
The issue with footnotes being set off this way (that is: that they're notes) isn't, though, that it's bad (which it is), it's that the alternatives are worse, at least in some situations. A footnote is an extra bit of information which is relevant to what you're reading, but not important enough that you need to read it right now. That might be because it's explanatory (that is: it expands and enlarges on the main point being made, but isn't directly required), or because it's a reference (a citation, or a link out to where this information was found so it can be looked up later and to prove that the author didn't just make this up), or because it's commentary (where you don't want to disrupt the text that's written with additions inline, maybe because you didn't write it). Or, and this is important, because it's funnier to set it off like this. A footnote used this way is like the voice of the narrator in The Perils of Penelope Pitstop being funny about the situation. Look, I'll choose a random book from my bookshelf4, Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett.
This is done because it's funny. Alternatives... would not be funny.5
If this read:
Even the industrial-grade crystal ball was only there as a sop to her customers. Mrs Cake could actually read the future in a bowl of porridge. (It would say, for example, that you would shortly undergo a painful bowel movement.) She could have a revelation in a panful of frying bacon.
then it's too distracting, isn't it? That's giving the thing too much prominence; it derails the point and then you have to get back on board after reading it. Similarly with making it a long note via <details> or via making it <section role="aside">, and Jake does make the point that that's for longer notes.
Even the industrial-grade crystal ball was only there as a sop to her customers. Mrs Cake could actually read the future in a bowl of porridge.
NoteIt would say, for example, that you would shortly undergo a painful bowel movement.She could have a revelation in a panful of frying bacon.
Now, admittedly, half the reason Pratchett's footnotes are funny is because they're imitating the academic use. But the other half is that there is a place for that "voice of the narrator" to make snarky asides, and we don't really have a better way to do it.
Sometimes the parenthesis is the best way to do it. Look at the explanations of "explanatory", "reference", and "commentary" in the paragraph above about what a footnote is. They needed to be inline; the definition of what I mean by "explanatory" should be read along with the word, and you need to understand my definition to understand why I think it's important. It's directly relevant. So it's inline; you must not proceed without having read it. It's not a footnote. But that's not always the case; sometimes you want to expand on what's been written without requiring the reader to read that expansion in order to proceed. It's a help; an addition; something relevant but not too relevant. (I think this is behind the convention that footnotes are in smaller text, personally; it's a typographic convention that this represents the niggling or snarky or helpful "voice in your head", annotating the ongoing conversation. But I haven't backed this up with research or anything.)
What's the alternative?
See, this is the point. Assume for the moment that I'm right6 and that there is some need for this type of annotation -- something which is important enough to be referenced here but not important enough that you must read it to proceed. How do we represent that in a document?
Jake's approaches are all reasonable in some situations. A note section (a "sidebar", I think newspaper people would call it?) works well for long clarifying paragraphs, little biographies of a person you've referenced, or whatever. If that content is less obviously relevant then hiding it behind a collapsed revealer triangle is even better. Short stuff which is that smidge more relevant gets promoted to be entirely inline and put in brackets. Stuff which is entirely reference material (citations, for example) doesn't really need to be in text in the document at all; don't footnote your point and then make a citation which links to the source, just link the text you wrote directly to the source. That certainly is a legacy of print media. There are annoying problems with most of the alternatives (a <details> can't go in a <p> even if inline, which is massively infuriating; sidenotes are great on wide screens but you still need to solve this problem on narrow, so they can't be the answer alone.) You can even put the footnote text in a tooltip as well, which helps people with mouse pointers or (maybe) keyboard navigation, and is what I do right here on this site.
But... if you've got a point which isn't important enough to be inline and isn't long enough to get its own box off to the side, then it's gotta go somewhere, and if that somewhere isn't "right there inline" then it's gotta be somewhere else, and... that's what a footnote is, right? Some text elsewhere that you link to.
We can certainly take advantage of being a digital document to display the annotation inline if the user chooses to (by clicking on it or similar), or to show a popover (which paper can't do). But if the text isn't displayed to you up front, then you have to click on something to show it, and that thing you click on must not itself be distracting. That means the thing you click on must be small, and not contentful. Numbers (or little symbols) are not too bad an approach, in that light. The technical issues here are dispensed with easily enough, as Lea Verou points out: yes, put a bigger hit target around your little undistracting numbers so they're not too hard to tap on, that's important.
But as Lea goes on to say, and Jake mentioned above... how do we deal with the idea that "3" needs to be both "small and undistracting" but also "give context so it's not just a meaningless number"? This is a real problem; pretty much by definition, if your "here is something which will show you extra information" marker gives you context about what that extra information is, then it's long enough that you actually have to read it to understand the context, and therefore it's distracting.7 This isn't really a circle that can be squared: these two requirements are in opposition, and so a compromise is needed.
Lea makes the same point with "How to provide context without increasing prominence? Wrapping part of the text with a link could be a better anchor, but then how to distinguish from actual links? Perhaps we need a convention." And I agree. I think we need a convention for this. But... I think we've already got a convention, no? A little superscript number or symbol means "this is a marker for additional information, which you need to interact with8 to get that additional information". Is it a perfect convention? No: the numbers are semantically meaningless. Is there a better convention? I'm not sure there is.
An end on't
So, Jake's right: a whole bunch of things that are currently presented on the web as "here's a little (maybe clickable) number, click it to jump to the end of the document to read a thing" could be presented much better with a little thought. We web authors could do better at this. But should footnotes go away? I don't think so. Once all the cases of things that should be done better are done better, there'll still be some left. I don't hate footnotes. I do hate limoncello and Red Bull, though.
- sensible ↩
- for good implementations, anyway; if you make your footnotes a link down to the end of the document, and then don't provide a link back via either the footnote marker or by adding it to the end, then you are a bad web author and I condemn you to constantly find unpaired socks, forever ↩
- or, ye gods and little fishes, a selection of mad typographic symbols which most people can't even type and need to be copied from the web search results for "that little squiggly section thingy" ↩
- alright, I chose a random Terry Pratchett book to make the point, I admit; I'm not stupid. But it really was the closest one to hand; I didn't spend extra time looking for particularly good examples ↩
- This is basically "explaining the joke", something which squashes all the humour out of it like grapes in a press. Sorry, PTerry. ↩
- I always do ↩
- I've seen people do footnote markers which are little words rather than numbers, and it's dead annoying. I get what they're trying to do, which is to solve this context problem, but it's worse ↩
- you might 'interact' with this marker by clicking on it in a digital document, or by looking it up at the bottom of the page in a print doc, but it's all interaction ↩
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