#How to make a footnote free

You need a way to go back to where you left! Think about it: You focus a reference, head to the relevant note in the footer, read it and thenвЂ¦ nothing. Our demo needs one final element to be fully accessible (as well as pretty cool): back-to-content links. Although I must say I like the pure yellow for a highlight вЂ“ it looks so authentic:

#How to make a footnote free

It is a bit raw, so feel free to customise. * Initialiazing a `footnotes` counter on the wrapper From there, itвЂ™s all about applying CSS styles. Then weвЂ™ll display the counter using the ::after pseudo-element. What we are going to do is increment a counter for every link in the document that has an aria-describedby attribute set to footnote-label.

Where are the CSS counters? Well worry not, my friend, they are coming. I know what youвЂ™re thinking: He said there would be CSS counters. Now screen reader users will understand when links are references to footnotes. In the footer, it becomes extremely easy. Numbered references in the text and an ordered list to display the actual footnotes

Then, we want to describe all our references with this title, using the aria-describedby attribute: Maintaining footnotes WeвЂ™ll hide this title with CSS so it doesnвЂ™t show up visually.

The first thing we want to do is add a title to our footer that will serve as a description or our footnote references. With a few styles, it might look like this:Д«efore actually getting onto the counters thing, we should make sure our markup is fully accessible for screen-readers. Our example is lightweight: we have some content in an element, which contains some links ( ) pointed at in-document IDs, mapped to the notes in the of the article. Cascading Style Sheets CSS counters are, in essence, variables maintained byД¬SS whose values may be incremented by CSS rules to track how many times TheyД¬ite references or comment on a designated part of the text above it. Footnotes are notes placed at the bottom of a page. The numbered references in the text and an ordered list to display the actualДЇootnotes in the footer, it becomes extremely easy. CSS-Powered Footnotes Maintaining footnotes manually can be a pain.

LetвЂ™s create a sample document so we can get started. What if we did not have to maintain the numbering by hand and it could be done automatically? The only thing we would have to pay attention to, is that the order of the actual notes in the footer respect the order of appearance of the references in the text. We could use CSS counters to make this whole thing much easier. For example, if you have 3 existing references to footnotes in a document, and you want to add another one, but on a piece of content that occurs before all the others, you have to re-number them all. If you happen to work on the same document often, changing the order of sections, adding references along the way, it might be tedious to have to re-number all existing footnotes. The problem with footnotes on the web is that they can be a pain to maintain. Usually, footnotes are represented with a number according to the position of the footnote in the document, then the same numbers are present at the bottom of the document, adding extra content. You often see them in papers when the author wants to add a piece of information or cite a reference without doing it in the middle of the content or using parentheses. They cite references or comment on a designated part of the text above it. According to Plagiarism which has a surprisingly long entry on the matter, footnotes are: I was playing with CSS counters the other day and thought about using them to deal with footnotes.