Table of contents

• Sidenotes
  • Further reading

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.

9^th 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:

1. 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)
2. 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:
   1. In the case of printing, it would be a great mess.
   2. On other readers or Markdown parsers outside of Jekyll I’d have a massive chunk of unrendered ugly text
3. 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

1. Lovely arrow test -> ↩