What should notes look like?

[scottkleinman]

I've been working on transforming our stylesheets from proofreading to publishable output, and I was wondering what form notes should take. The following image is a clip of a critical edition of the SEL life of St Helen. It's not an Early Middle English text, but I've created it from AEME code.

The note is a simple Bootstrap popover triggered by clicking on the asterisk. But I'm not sure if that's the effect or the trigger we want. Suggestions are welcome. Also note that line numbering is every fine lines. Any objections to that as the default?

[dorothyk98]

I think every 5 line works. What do other projects use? I think it looks fine, though the question is if people are citing the notes, can we have these things numbered? Also, what does the glossary look like? Meg, what do you want to do w/ Ormulum?

[scottkleinman]

That's a good point about citation. Digital editions do not have really good models for this, so far as I know. The most logical user's approach would be to cite "Note to line X", but that's not really adequate. We could assign @xml:id numbers to notes, but that seems to me equally unsatisfactory from a user's point of view. I think the best option would be to use the @xml:id to generate a persistent url, but we would then have to add a function to expose the note from it, which adds all sorts of overhead.

All this bears some further thought, but the main question here is about what the trigger should look like. I'm a little uneasy about using consecutive numbers, as that requires re-numbering if additional encoding is added in the future.

[dorothyk98]

Oh you are so write about the numbering issue. Also, in thinking of functionality, I just used some METS texts in class where we all took our phone devices outside to do a little play walk through. Croxton Play of the Sacrament. The numbering was completely screwed up on the devices. Have we figured out some thoughts about tablets and phone use?