1 |
The email edition of the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter (GWN) posts web and |
2 |
email address as footnotes after the paragraph they occur in, which |
3 |
often means that four or more extremely similar addresses may be listed |
4 |
one after another with only a number to distinguish them, e.g. |
5 |
|
6 |
> 18. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=31562 |
7 |
> 19. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=33841 |
8 |
> 20. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=33745 |
9 |
> 21. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=34174 |
10 |
|
11 |
It is not at all clear what these are, other than threads in the Gentoo |
12 |
forums <http://forums.gentoo.org/>. When reading, it is possible to |
13 |
totally ignore the footnote references and not realise there is an |
14 |
webpage associated with what's being discussed, or to forget it by the |
15 |
time you reach the footnotes, and have to have your thought process upset. |
16 |
|
17 |
Apparently, this has its origins in the Debian Weekely Newsletter (DWN), |
18 |
which does things similarly. No doubt, they, in turn, pulled it from the |
19 |
tradition of publishing a bibliography in books and referencing them by |
20 |
numbers, often with a smaller references as a footnote.. Being a paged |
21 |
medium, footnotes always stand out in books, but are ill-suited to |
22 |
emails, where the footnote will not necessarily be visible until after |
23 |
the entire paragraph's been read. |
24 |
|
25 |
However, every medium has its own way of publishing links to webpages |
26 |
and the like: HTML shows them as hyperlinks, for example. In most media |
27 |
where hypelinks aren't possible, especially in email, the tradition is |
28 |
to include them inline surrounded by angle brackets, as with my URL above. |
29 |
|
30 |
Is there any particular reason why the GWN does this, other than because |
31 |
that's what the DWN does? Would it be possible to have it changed to the |
32 |
clearer, more conventional method? |
33 |
|
34 |
Tristan McLeay. |
35 |
|
36 |
|
37 |
-- |
38 |
gentoo-admin@g.o mailing list |