What's Missing From The Web

Why does this annoy noone else? Here's the great thing about the Web. It has been great since it came about because in Scholarly Writing and so forth, rather than using footnotes, endnotes, or inline attributions, we use hyperlinks. This is splendid! Less distracting. Okay, about as distracting as endnotes. So what the hell, Rupe? What are you gonna bitch about?

Here's the thing. Terry Pratchett and Doug Adams used footnotes to great effect. There's a couple of elements to this. Something parenthetical statements just can't do. You've got your asterisk, your cross, your whatnot saying "hey! You gotsta look at the bottom to see more info about this!" You want so bad to wait until you're at the bottom of the page since it's just a footnote and not as important as the main text. But there's this huge chunk of small text at the bottom. Staring at you. Mocking you. And it was always worth it, wasn't it?

Try to do that with a web page. You can drop in a link to some relevant fact, you could even use that whole #onthepage thing, but it's just not the same. Doesn't taunt you precisely correctly.

So that's me bitching. Keeping my blogging hand strong.