Just What You Want: Information about Footnotes
July 11, 2025
No smart software to write this essay. This dinobaby is somewhat old fashioned.
I am completing my 14th monograph. Some of these 150 page plus documents became books. Examples range from The Google Legacy, published in 2003 for a client and then as a public document in 2004 by Infonortics Ltd., a specialty publisher somewhere in England. Others were published by Panda Press in Sweden. Martin White and I published a book about enterprise search management, and I do not recall what outfit published the book. When I started writing texts to accompany my lectures for ISS Telestrategies, the US National Cyber Crime events, and other specialized conferences, I decided to generate Adobe PDF files and make these “books” available to those in my classes and lectures. Dark Web Notebook and CyberOSINT were “self published.” Why? The commercial specialty publishers were going out of business or did not have a way to market the books I wrote. I wrote a couple of monographs about Japan’s investments in database technology in the early 1990s for the US Office of Technology Assessment. But I have lost track of these “books.”
When I read “Give Footnotes the Boot,” I thought about how I had handled “notes” in my long form writings. For this blog which is a collection of “notes” to myself given the appearance of an essay, I usually cite an article. I then add my preliminary thoughts about the write up, usually including a couple of the source document’s “interesting” statements. The blog, therefore, is an online notebook with 20,000 plus entries written for an audience of one: Me.
I noted that the cited “footnote” article says:
If the footnote markers are links, then the user can use the back button/gesture to return to the main content. But, even though this restores the previous scroll position, the user is still left with the challenge of finding their previous place in a wall of text6. We could try to solve that problem by dynamically pulling the content from the footnotes and displaying it in a popover. In some browsers (including yours) that will display like a tooltip, pointing directly back to the footnote marker. Thanks to modern web features, this can be done entirely without JavaScript7. But this is still shit! I see good, smart people, who’d always avoid using “click here” as link text, littering their articles with link texts such as 1, 7, and sometimes even 12. Not only is this as contextless as “click here”, it also provides the extra frustration of a tiny-weeny hit target. Update: Adrian Roselli pointed out that there are numerous bugs with accessibility tooling and superscript. And all this for what? To cargo-cult academia? Stop it! Stop it now! Footnotes are a shitty hack built on the limitations of printed media. It’s dumb to build on top of those limitations when they don’t exist on the web platform. So I ask you to break free of footnotes and do something better.
The essay omits one option; that is, just write as if the information in the chapter, book, paragraph is common knowledge. The result is fewer footnotes.
I am giving this footnote free approach a try in the book I am working on to accompany my lectures about Telegram for law enforcement, cyber attorneys, and intelligence professionals. I know that most people do not know that a specific quote I include from Pavel Durov originated from a Russia language blog. However, citing the Russian blog, presenting the title of the blog post in Cyrillic, including the English translation, and adding comments like “no longer online” would be the appropriate way to let my reader know I did not make up Pavel’s statement about having more than 100 children.
I am assuming that every person on earth knows that Pavel thinks he is a super human and has the duty to spawn more Pavels.
How will this work out? My hunch is that my readers will use my Telegram Labyrinth monograph to get oriented to a service alleged to be a criminal enterprise by the French judiciary. If someone wants to know where one of my “facts” originates, I will go through my notes, including blog posts, for the link to the document I read. Will those sources be findable in 2025 when the book comes out? Probably not.
Online information is disappearing at an alarming rate. The search systems I use “disappear” content even though I have a PDF of the source document in my electronic file. Intermediaries go out of business or filters block access to content.
I like the ideas in Jake Archibald’s essay. I also like the academic rigor of footnotes. But for the Telegram Labyrinth, I am minimizing footnotes. I assume that every investigator, intelligence professional, and government lawyer will know about Telegram. Therefore, what’s in my new book is common knowledge. That means, “Sorry, Miss Dalton, Stevie is dumping 95 percent of the footnotes.” (I should footnote that Miss Dalton was one of my teachers who wanted footnotes in Modern Language Association style for everything single thing her students wrote.) Nope. Blame Web rot, blame my laziness, blame the wild social media environment.
You will live and probably have some of that Telegram common knowledge refreshed; for example, the Telegram programming language FIFT is like FORTH only better. Get the pun. The Durovs have a sense of humor.
Stephen E Arnold, July1, 2025
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