I recently added some nifty JS to my own site to deal with extensive footnotes by floating them when the mouse hovers on a footnote link; eg. the footnotes in my Terrorism is not about Terror essay.
Of course, this Jquery stuff requires the footnotes to be actual hyperlinks to footnotes, which is a Pandoc Markdown extension, so this may not be a very practical suggestion, but would go well with a hidden/collapsed footnote/reference section.
Neat, but not very keyboard-friendly and a bit fickle for long footnotes.
I kinda like to think of footnotes as parallel text and use them that way myself, but I haven't yet seen a decent way to implement this. Platypope (link to random article to demonstrate it) embeds them into the sidebar, which kinda works, but again has length constraints.
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!