Ask HN: Would the site benefit from footnote parsing?

3 points

16 years ago

There's a great number of comments that make good use of footnotes[1] to eliminate the visual clutter that pasted links cause within the body of their text. I think footnote parsing would bump usability up a notch.

I found a grease-monkey script[2] for parsing footnotes in Paul Graham's articles, but I need to modify it slightly to get it to work per-comment. I'm thinking simply hyperlinking the original footnote anchor to the target destination (if one exists) would suffice.

Most comments are obviously not that long, but some screens (on net-books and handhelds) are small enough to require scrolling. If executed properly, and widely used by commenters, it might work well for quickly opening a link without jumping to the bottom of a comment, and for easily revealing context of the links in footnotes.

Grease-monkey is great, but Mobile Safari and Opera Mini don't support user-scripts. If a server-side solution would be a better idea, would the regular BBCODE-style hyperlinks with custom anchor text be a better solution? Let me know what do you think.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667285

[2] http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/6954

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