Table of contents
Since I put a lot of care and attention to details in this website (probably even too much) I figured out it’s worth sharing my decisions about implementations and features in a log, so that the overall design philosophy of tommi.space is summarized in one place and I can keep track of my thoughts.
9th January 2021
Sidenotes #
Sidenotes are awesome, and after taking a look at Koos Loijesteijn post about them, I figured it would be great to implement them on here, too.
I decided not to, for now, for three main reasons:
- They are impossible to be implemented in Markdown, they need a lot of HTML and I don’t have the skills for making a Jekyll plugin to transform footnotes in sidenotes (but it may be [[ Website log#Sidenotes|a great idea ]] to create one)
- I could easily create an
{% include sidenotes.html %}
where I could pass as arguments both the note content and the word linked to it, but it wouldn’t satisfy me for two reasons:- In the case of printing, it would be a great mess.
- On other readers or Markdown parsers outside of Jekyll I’d have a massive chunk of unrendered ugly text
- Considered the reasons above, it's not worth it. I use footnotes very few times (even though I massively over-use parentheses (as I am doing right now)) and with the lovely arrow1 automatically created, it’s painless to use them.
Further reading #
- A lovely overview of sidenotes implementation techniques and a thorough explanation of their philosophy
- Koos Loijesteijn’s sidenotes source code
- Tufte CSS
Lovely arrow test -> ↩
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