beoShaffer comments on The Cognitive Science of Rationality - Less Wrong

88 Post author: lukeprog 12 September 2011 08:48PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 13 September 2011 09:03:46PM 0 points [-]

That would be useful. I guess the way I've seen this done sometimes is to use symbols like * † ‡ for content footnotes and numbers for citation endnotes? But that usually works on paper, where pages are short and you can see the content of the footnote at a glance. I'm not sure I've seen a solution for this that works on the web. It'd be nice to have an integrated Less Wrong footnote system so that we could test different ways of displaying the content. Maybe a hover-over-the-footnote-to-read-its-contents feature?

Comment author: beoShaffer 13 September 2011 10:07:05PM *  1 point [-]

Maybe a hover-over-the-footnote-to-read-its-contents feature?

I've seen this work well elsewhere.

Comment author: gwern 14 September 2011 12:39:54AM 0 points [-]

I've been very pleased with it on gwern.net; might be a little tricky on LW because it relies on the footnotes all having a particular name which the Javascript can then blindly load a related footnote in the popup, or whatever, and LWers seem to use various tools to generate footnoted-HTML (when they do at all).