Random notes from mg

a blog by Marius Gedminas

Marius is a Python hacker. He works for Programmers of Vilnius, a small Python/Zope 3 startup. He has a personal home page at http://gedmin.as. His email is marius@gedmin.as. He does not like spam, but is not afraid of it.

Sat, 12 Sep 2009

Footnotes done well

I like the way footnotes are implemented here: Snakes on the Web by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.

mini-screencast of animated footnote

(Recorded with byzanz. My gif-fu is nonexistent or I would make it loop, but with a sufficiently long delay at the end to avoid irritation. Now you have to reload the whole page if you missed the animation.)

I'm somewhat ambivalent about the animation effect. On one hand, shiny! On the other hand, hitting tiny clickable areas is not good usability. Still, shiny!

Footnotes are kind of a personal pet-peeve of mine.

posted at 01:58 | tags: | permanent link to this entry | 3 comments
Yeah, I should turn off the animations; they're annoying.

I agree with you that tiny clickable areas are bad UI; any ideas for something better?
posted by Jacob Kaplan-Moss at Sat Sep 12 17:26:39 2009
Actually, I don't find the animations annoying.

I would suggest identifying the footnotes themselves, though.  Currently, when you click 3 and 4, it's a bit ambiguous whether you've got a single two-paragraph footnote, or two one-paragraph ones.  (Also, the text of footnote 4 is displayed above the text of footnote 3, if you click on 3 and then on 4.)

Regarding the size of clickable areas, the only idea I have is to make the footnotes always visible, thus removing the need of clicking.
posted by Marius Gedminas at Sat Sep 12 22:29:00 2009
Yeah, why not have the footnotes visible by default, but make their entire area clickable to hide them?

if i don't want to read the note, i just 'click it out of the way' (or just ignore it).
posted by Tom Lazar at Sun Sep 13 14:40:45 2009

Name (required)


E-mail (will not be shown)


URL


Comment (some HTML allowed)


A picture of me

Archives

Author's pick

Tags

RSS
Made with PyBlosxom
Copyright © 2004–2011 Marius Gedminas. This page uses valid HTML and CSS, I hope.
Powered by PyBlosxom with a few plugins. Source.