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Originally Posted by JSWolf
Personally, I want the footnote indicator to be large and underlined and bold. I want it to stand out.
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Good for you -- and you should have what you want. This, of course, argues for user-selectable options for footnote and link indicators. What a concept! Don't hold your breath. Not because it's difficult to do. (Well, it's more difficult than just switching the font or background, etc.) Just because you'll get mountains of arguments about how it's difficult to do and (mostly) it's not necessary, and it's too complicated for people to use, and people aren't used to that, and people don't really "need" it, and blah, blah, blah (basically every software UI/UX meeting you've ever been in, if you've been in any
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I don't want this tiny superscript nonsense that's not all that easy to see. I want to know it's there. I may not want to go to the footnote, but if you make it hard to see, by making it small, gray and not underlined, then get rid of it as you don't want anyone to click on it.
I like this... This is some[*] text that has a footnote.
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Yes, that's a very common footnote convention. I'm pretty sure people were using it on stone tablets, and it's stood the test of time. I've considered it, but think it's ugly and there are better alternatives in terms of specific characters nowadays if you want your footnote indicators inline. I agree about the naked asterisk being. For an alternative, the strongest argument currently is how things will appear on monochrome displays -- where you absolutely need a distinctive indicator. Here, the "[*]" works well, but so do some alternative symbols from Unicode sets -- and they're less 18th-century and ugly.
