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Re: Using a definition list for footnote/asterisked items

for

From: Pete Fairhurst
Date: Nov 3, 2010 2:15PM

On 3 November 2010 08:34, Nathalie Sequeira < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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 :)) <snip />


On 3 November 2010 17:11, < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> as a screen reader user that seems like a good idea but I haven't run in to
> it very often when dealing with footnotes. As I primarily deal with legal
> text where there are citations I just expect them to be found at the bottom
> of a page or at the end of an article and if I really need to review or
> cite
> the foot note I go to it but the back link is a good idea. I would suspect
> however that there would be problems with this when there are documents
> that
> contain dozens of foot notes.
>

Thank you both, very much. That's put my mind at rest and I'm confident -
as long as it's not for 3 dozen of the things! - using a well-linked DL is
the right approach for footnotes.

In particular, Nathalie, I too was worried about the idea that defining an
asterisk on a page one particular association... but then, what else are
asterisks really for in documents? Common writing standards (I'm just
talking from an English language point of view, mind) that's pretty much the
only time you see asterisks in copy; they really aren't used for anything
else.

Of course, there are other symbols writers use, like the "dagger" for
example. But the principle remains the same, which lead me to think that
this should, after all, be a decent, semantically appropriate use of a
definition list.

- Pete

~~~~

"Haste in art is almost always vulgarisation." H.G. Wells