Hi! I want to know if there's any likelihood of footnotes becoming an element of HTML. They're mentioned in the HTML spec in section 4.14.4 as a feature without "a dedicated mechanism." The spec then suggests alternatives. Of the alternatives: using <title> is inaccessible, using <a> causes me to easily lose my place in the text with how I prefer to have it positioned on the screen, and the other suggestions don't apply to the type of footnotes I'm interested in. Altogether, I feel pretty dissatisfied with the state of footnotes on the web. :(

I genuinely love reading footnotes in fiction (for jokes and translation notes!) but the UX for footnotes on the web makes it so that the inconvenience of them outweighs the joy I'd get from reading those extra bits when they'd be most appropriate. I was happy enough to overlook the inconvenience but after so many encounters I feel like there has to be a better way.

I’m not part of WHATWG, but this is a topic I am interested in.
However, note that there are many ways to do footnotes:

1. As is most popular on the web, you can put footnote content at the very end of a page or section and link references to them in the main text.
2. Using CSS Grid, you can make footnote content appear in a sidebar, Edward Tufte style (https://www.edwardtufte.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/VE-Spread-Detail-2.jpg). This is my personal preferred way to do footnotes.
3. Using HTML Popovers, you can put footnote content declaratively in a popover element, then add references to them in the main text using buttons. The buttons can declaratively make their respective popovers appear.

For all three methods, an <aside> element could contain the footnote content. But all of these are quite different semantically.

That’s the problem with trying to standardize “footnotes”. The semantics of what we call “footnotes” are diverse and may be quite specific to the document context that they appear in. Some people will want content at the very end; some people will want them in a sidebar near their references; some people will want popovers.

(With that said, I’m a bit surprised nobody else has asked this question in the whatwg/html GitHub repository. But I know that this has been discussed many times in the past.)

Smudge: If you’re most interested in laying out footnotes in printed pages, you’re looking for the CSS Generated Content for Paged Media Module.

You might also be interested in the generated cross-references in the (confusingly similarly named) CSS Generated Content Module.

Please note that both of these are still under development and therefore have little browser support.

Hi!
When trying to build the DOM standard locally with make local I get the following error:

LINE 6103:64: Multiple possible 'head' element refs.
Arbitrarily chose https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#the-head-element
To auto-select one of the following refs, insert one of these lines into a <pre class=link-defaults> block:
spec:html; type:element; text:head
spec:epub-34; type:element; text:head
<{head}>
 ✘  Did not generate, due to errors exceeding the allowed error level.
make: *** [Makefile:19: local] Error 2

Is there something I'm doing wrong or is this a known issue?