Sidenotes in Web Design
This article would be a lot more persuasive if it&#x27;s footnotes on mobile weren&#x27;t a total mess of a system that&#x27;s going in my bookmarks of bad design.<p>Everything is in black with white borders so the layers of pop over is hard to distinguish from everything else. The close button is also only at the top which isn&#x27;t immediately obvious to find when you&#x27;ve read the text and is hard to reach on big mobile screens. (it&#x27;s also in black with white borders and looks visually more part of the page then the pop over).<p>It also scrolls the back page to the link, so when you close the article now looks different then it did. At least when a link scrolls down to a footnote then back there&#x27;s visual indication it did some scrolling. Here the scroll is obscured by the popup so it&#x27;s very disorienting that it changes when you close the modal. (Again compounded by the fact everything looks the same colour and design)<p>Conversely the preview links (?) suffer from being too different to each other - the top block on mobile (starting &quot;Sidenotes&#x2F;margin notes are a typographic convention...&quot; has three links. The first tufte link pops up a decent text that has better typography then this source article. The second tufte link (that uses the same anchor text and looks like it goes to the same place!) shows an identical pop up style with totally different text, now in a tiny size with a screenshot of even tiny text to add to the confusion. Just in case you can squint to read it&#x27;s all made slightly transparent so you can still read the 4x larger original article text underneath.<p>There was an article on hacker news a couple of weeks ago where a guy was looking into the history of the Bloomfield bridge. I commented then that that article had some wonderful &quot;footnotes&quot;, they just expanded inline you could read or not the extra info very easily. This is just an ugly and  frustrating experience and certainly not anything that instills me with confidence in their articles advice.