I loved the NYT book review by Gertrude Himmelfarb. First the title is great: “Where Have All the Footnotes Gone?” Second of all, I just love the subject matter because I too hate endnotes and absolutely adore footnotes. I especially love those long 1/2-pagers that give you so much extra content and places to go to continue your studying if desired. The beauty is, you can look down from your page without having to annoyingly turn to the back of the book, and see what the author has to say further than he/she says in the piece. If it’s useful, you can read the whole thing and jot down some interesting notes for future reading.

So, the question becomes: is this possible and how does one do this easily on the Web? Piggin.net addresses this problem in its “macro-typography of footnotes” section. Although they suggest interleaving the notes inside the text, I see pop-ups as the best for us as historians (and the CSS seems relatively easy…famous last words?) with side notes as the second best. If it were easier to interleave the notes after paragraphs, that may work but apparently that is difficult. And anything labeled difficult by these folks, I tend to believe them! But both pop-ups and side notes can be “separate” from the document yet close enough as to not interrupt the reader’s flow too much. They will also allow for those wonderful and lengthy footnotes that can link to other sources that could then be pulled up in another browser or tab. That seems like money to me…