The situation is even worse on the Internet, because while footnotes in a book aren’t too bad (as long as they stay on the same page), web pages don’t really have ‘pages’ and ‘footnotes’ wind up degrading to simply endnotes. As a result, who ever reads endnotes in a physical book? Only the most diligent will keep a thumb in the back to actually look up endnotes, and so they are either unread or tend to be relegated to the most utilitarian uses like raw citations. This river of text may be studded with the occasional footnote or endnote, including ancillary material like citations or digressions or extended discussion of tricky points or anticipation of objections or just the author being witty, which require constant back and forth from the place in the text where they make sense and where they can actually be read. Where footnotes put additional material in small sections at the bottom of the page, organized by number, and endnotes stuff them at the end of the document, sidenotes instead use the large unused left/right margin of the page.īecause it’s uncomfortable to read sentences which wrap from edge to edge, particularly for large widths, requiring short lines many documents wind up looking like a narrow river of text flowing down a vast blank map. Sidenotes and margin notes (sometimes also called “asides”) are an alternative to footnotes / endnotes in design. For heavy footnote users or users who want a drop-in, runtime Javascript-based solutions like sidenotes.js may be more useful. I review some of the available implementations.įor general users, I recommend Tufte-CSS: it is fast & simple (using only compile-time generation of sidenotes, rendered by static HTML/CSS), popular, and easy to integrate into most website workflows. Tufte-CSS has popularized the idea and since then, there has been a proliferation of slightly variant approaches. However, they are not commonly used, perhaps because web browsers until relatively recently made it hard to implement sidenotes easily & reliably.
(Footnote variants, like “floating footnotes” which pop up on mouse hover, reduce the reader’s effort but don’t eliminate it.) They are particularly useful for web pages, where ‘footnotes’ are de facto endnotes, and clicking back and forth to endnotes is a pain for readers. We hope you enjoy it's simplicity & find it useful.Sidenotes/margin notes are a typographic convention which improves on footnotes & endnotes by instead putting the notes in the page margin to let the reader instantly read them without needing to refer back and forth to the end of the document (endnotes) or successive pages (footnotes spilling over). Sidenotes was built in less than a week for our final project. The four of us are currently attending DevBootcamp in NYC.
#Sidenotes for chrome install
If you need to pull up a past note or url you may visit our search page, which will allow you to redirect back to the URL and have your note ready to edit. Your notes are linked with the URL where you took the note and will appear upon your next visit. We leverage the power of the Dropbox Datastore API and Google Chrome Local Storage to sync your notes immediately, both online and offline.
Sidenotes is packaged into a simple Chrome Extension, meaning your notes are never far away. We eliminate any unnecessary steps, leaving you with the simplest process for taking notes & annotating the web. With the single click of a button, or a single keystroke, you are writing. Sidenotes is always there when you need it. No more switching tabs, pausing videos, or running multiple apps to jot down your thoughts. Sidenotes is the fastest way to write notes in your browser. We were frustrated with the disconnect between traditional note-taking, and the fluid nature of the web, so we came up with the solution. Then go back to the video or article, and find where you left off. Pause a video, leave an article, switch tabs, then jot down useful pieces of information. While reading articles or watching videos online, you come across useful information that you would like to jot down to store your thoughts. Writing notes on the web is clunky and frustrating.
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