Today’s Notes
This is a novel way to hyperlink in print (from article by David Foster Wallace).
Man, I wrote an email to linuxfund inquiring about funding for the OOo SVG Import/Export feature support. In this article you see that money from the linuxfund credit cards has accumulated to $126K!!! That is astounding! Get me in there, I’ll admin the project! Distribute those funds yesterday! There needs to be major headway in this type of funding organization to help out all the independent developers out there. UPDATE: Patrick Mochel of Open Source Development Labs indicated a willingness to ensure a positive future for LinuxFund. Bryce…can you give a coffee room nod at OSDL please. You can drop him my card… 
Good God that is horrible. Novel yes, good idea no.
Jakob Nielsen tried it in his books but writing a book like writing a web page or a magazine article is horribly unsatisfying for me as a reader. It was all the more disturbing that someone who was supposedly a design expect inflicted this format on users.
What I want from a book is to be able to sit down and digest a long coherent stream of information in narrative format. The constant distrcation and interruption of asides makes things very unpleasant to read.
If you are creating a textbook intended to be read in small chunks and used as a reference then it good to include lots of references but you will find text books make a point of including these in the flow of the page.
Blockquoting is a good way to keep the flow but make it easier for readers to skip the asides they are not so interested in. Anyone who has read the Lord of Rings and skipped past the poetry already understands the value of this (go on, admit it, almost no one reads the poetry).
Writing a book is different, or at least should be different and have more strucutre than writing magazine articles or web pages. In a short magazine article it is no big deal to go and read the notes before or after reading the main article but constantly doing so across many chapters of a book is a nuisance constrantly distracting you and forcing you to break your concentration to go across and read the notes.
This layout uses colour to match the references which is utterly useless if you ever go to photocopy the article or if you have poor vision. Unlike all good acedemic papers it fails to provided numbered references which make it far easier to track to the correct footnote.
This may seem like an interesting novelty but try reading a full book done like this and I bet pretty soon you will dislike it as much as I do and wish they had stuck with the tried and tested methods of print layout that have worked for certuries.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
Comment by Alan Horkan — July 14, 2005 @ 11:19 am
Yes, I prefer academic footnotes and agree that the color thing is a horrible idea. It is interesting though to see the remediation of hyperlinks into physical print. I’m sure there will be many more iterations of this with e-paper, etc.
Comment by jon — July 14, 2005 @ 12:15 pm