#FirstWorldProblem: Reading footnotes on PG's essays makes you lose your place, so if you're like me you never read them until you get to the bottom. Solution: Bookmarklet.
This is attacking a problem that needs a lot more attention: how should footnotes (or endnotes or whatever) be handled? In other words, what is a good way to handle the addition of optional material in an otherwise linear text?<p>That said, looks like a nice idea. Not sure how much I like this particular solution yet. Thanks for posting.
For this kind of problems, I prefer userscripts solutions over bookmarklets as they don't require any intervention from my side -- they auto-load, which is great. This is the typical scenario for a userscripts -- predictable URL sets on where they should fire.<p>Think about adding this to <a href="http://userscripts.org/" rel="nofollow">http://userscripts.org/</a>.
Userscripts are handled via GreaseMonkey extension in Firefox and from what I know, natively by Chrome but I never checked.<p>--<p>Side note: believe me or not, but I stopped using bookmarks toolbar in my Firefox a year ago or two; I store bookmarks with short memorable names and use kbd to launch them; CTRL-T/CTRL-L, type, ENTER. I abandoned having a toolbar since I was never able to keep visual order in it after constantly adding new items.
Awesome. I always tell myself I'm going to make something like this when reading pg's essays (I specifically remember re-thinking it during the last one) and then never do. Now I don't have to--thanks! :)
A couple years ago, the Django Advent had a nifty JS enhancement for footnotes. I thought it worked so well I stole it for a personal project of mine. I would've linked to the original but they're now offline, so if you'll pardon the personal plug you can see it in action at <a href="http://sonsofterra.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sonsofterra.com/</a>