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Re: Using a definition list for footnote/asterisked items

for

From: Nathalie Sequeira
Date: Nov 3, 2010 2:36AM

Hi Pete,

>> From a usability point of view (for AT) I've always considered it good
>> practice to have a "back-link" at the close of the footnote that will take
>> me back to the place in the main body where the initial footnote link was
>> located.
>>
>
> I'm also interested to know thoughts/opinion on "back to..." links in
> footnotes as well. I would normally do this, but left them out in my haste
> to cobble together an example.
>
I find "back to.." links in footnotes very useul indeed, and I don't use
AT. I'd say they're great for everyone :)

Your dt+dd view of footnotes is interesting - I am a great fan of dl's
and have been finding many situations in which they seem to me to be
semantically the most appropriate (perhaps too many? a question that
arose for me the other day, so I may be overly biased in favor at the
moment :))

Looking at your concrete code example and seeing those asterisks as the
"definition term" did let me waver a bit at first (it's not even a
word?! should the referring text passage be repeated? but no, that
woulld add unnecessary fluff...), but on second thought not overly
much.... how does a screen reader read that? something like "asterisk
equals explanation/source" (Fangs emulator would represent it thus)?
That actually sounds rather rational to me, and CSS styling could give
the dl the "normal" look and feel of footnotes for sighted users...
And, what are footnotes? They give further information about the main
text,i.e, explain, define. Yes, they appear as a sort of "list" at the
text's end, but are they really a list, if I define a list as a set of
related items? They are formally related, yes, in being footnotes, and
when footnotes are numbered an ol does make sense to my mind. But
semantically, footnote 1 may have nothing to do at all with footnote 2 or 3.
So IMHO I do think you have a good case there for seeing footnote infos
as definitions.

on the side:
What actually troubled me most when I was required to mark up a text
with footnotes of late was the resulting link texts (in my case i, ii,
iii...) - that isn't really meaningful at all, i s it? wouldn't it be
preferable to link the text itself (after all, we've got "hypertext
markup" here, that offers this and other possibilities that printed text
just doesn't, like explaining acronyms inline). I ended up sticking to
the originl text's format, but this question remained quietly and
unresolved in the back of my mind .

It's great to be able to think such questions through together -
something I miss being able to do in my usual working environment, and
very fruitive!
Thanks,
Nathalie