gwern comments on The Neglected Virtue of Curiosity - Less Wrong

23 Post author: vallinder 28 January 2012 05:28PM

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Comment author: gwern 29 January 2012 05:22:52AM 15 points [-]

Reading these complaints, I can't help but feel a little smug about my own articles on gwern.net - not only do I have real footnotes, I have floating footnotes to make it even easier, and I usually have fulltext as well. To top it all off, I have an elaborate archiving system just to deal with linkrot.

Comment author: Morendil 29 January 2012 09:17:50AM *  6 points [-]

Smugness is justified. The floating footnotes are a great solution.

The standard way to not lose your place while reading a Web page is to Cmd- or Alt-click a link, opening it in a new tab. But the other problem solved by the floating notes is that hyperlinks are generally opaque as to what's behind them; a reader appreciates the extra context provided by a "title" attribute, your tooltips are an extension of that. What's impressive is that they work equally well on a touchscreen device.

Since as far as I can tell this is done in Js+CSS, we could easily steal your mechanism for LW. Would you object?

ETA: never mind, I've found the source. I'm now feeling bad about using the clichéd phrase "usability nightmare", but this would definitely be a good addition to LW.

Comment author: gwern 29 January 2012 02:39:33PM 2 points [-]

Since as far as I can tell this is done in Js+CSS, we could easily steal your mechanism for LW. Would you object?

Well, I didn't write it in the first place, and I'd be happy to see it on LW.