Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Is there anything that could be smaller than an asterisk?
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Stripping away all the emotion and the "we-shouldn't-deviate-from-what-we're-doing-because ... well ... that's-what-people-are-used-to" overall philosophy -- in virtue of which we'd still all be using MS-DOS (or worse, 3270s on mainframes), and definitely not hypertext, and certainly not hypertext with pop-up footnotes -- and understanding that someone whose business is creating products acceptable to current convention
must conform to that convention, and that I'm definitely not in that position, and acknowledging that at this point in my life I'm not going to be doing an Edward Tufte thing and strike a blow for formatting freedom and innovation, and that I've just got to stop this run-on sentence at some point ...
We are in fact left with this quite accurate observation concerning the noble asterisk. In response to this I can only agree, but point out that something like the Unicode "circled i" ("information") character seems to work quite nicely (at least in English and several other Western languages). Appropriately sized, something like it is a pretty decent "noticeable, but not intrusively so" indicator.
For my own part ...
Hey, look ... My book is a one-off. I'm likely going to avoid any publishing house with it (this was the plan from the beginning), in part to avoid certain editorial or conventional constraints -- and suffer the risk. But I would like to know
how to do something, or (even more important)
whether something can be done. And this particular issue about underlining links arose in the context of an overall design I had for a general/principled approach to handling links/bibliographic citations/footnotes. But ...
I've just spent two days of rather intense empirical investigation (read "essentially debugging") of the Kindle implementation of footnotes. And conclude that they are of VERY limited use. In some ways the Amazon handling of them is quite good. They actually seem thoroughly to
parse the XHTML involved and retain ALL the structural information. But then they just decide to ignore a lot of it with respect to what they're willing to represent in a footnote. So at this point -- purely as a matter of practicality -- I think I'm going to retreat to the current lowest common denominator conventions since I simply don't seem to have access to the control I need in order to get what I really want. And so avoiding the underlining of certain things as a link indicator is no longer a direction I see as viable since I'm not able to implement the overall navigation design that required it.
But if there's something I've missed here about Kindle footnotes and what you can expect to put into them, please let me know. If I could get them to display decent structural complexity and active links, I might go back to my original navigation ideas. Basically, all I wanted to do is to have a link to a standard formatted bibliographic entry (possibly containing an external link) and have that displayed in a pop-up footnote as it appears when viewing the bibliography section itself. Seemingly a bridge too far.