[wonder_er]

This is super cool!

I've only recently discovered that Markdown has footnotes, and I've gone to down adding footnotes everywhere.

I use Jekyll + markdown on my website, and I now have lots of fun adding footnotes to my writing.

I added a "footnote tutorial" for readers on https://josh.works/turing-backend-prep-01-intro#why-this-rub..., to help them learn how to navigate the footnotes.

I _love_ your library, and I love the problem that you're solving with it.

Along the way, I've looked at Gwern's sidenotes[0] and Nate Berkapec's "footnotes"/sidenotes [1].

I eventually want to do something more "in-line", like what you've down with Expounder, but I've been satiated with markdown footnotes for now.

[0]: https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes# [1]: https://www.nateberkopec.com/blog/2017/03/10/how-i-made-self...

[StavrosK]

Thank you! I used to use footnotes too, but I didn't like how they took you out of the flow of the text. Expounder aims to specifically let users stay in the flow of reading, which is why one of the core instructions is that the text should work in context, as if it were never hidden.

[mrec]

It's good to see experiments along these lines. I really like Wikipedia's recent-ish rich tooltips on link mouseover, and the HTML <summary>/<details> elements deserve to be more widely known.

From the demo it look as if Expounder is one-way - once you've expanded something, you can't collapse it again. Is that correct?

[StavrosK]

Yes and no, see this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238717

[ghaff]

I miss footnotes on the printed page because, in addition to references (where they're probably better as endnotes to be honest) I find they're great to use for parentheticals that bulletproof a point, add some background that's not essential to a point being made, etc. But these latter uses work significantly less well in a blog post or ebook.

[gknoy]

Oh, wow. The Sidenotes discussion from Gwern that you linked is _phenomenal_. Thank you for sharing these.

[iFreilicht]

What I dislike about footnotes like that is that they pollute the browser history. If you want to leave the page but clicked on a few footnotes and their backlinks, you have to go “back” through all of them.

Thank you so much for posting gwern’s sidenote article! I want to use sidenotes on my site and this was a very valuable resource!

[psychoslave]

Back button usually come with an unfoldable list of jump points.

I am more ennoyed by how the jump points are turned into a useless feature by so many javascript out there which load new content without impacting the browsing history.