footnotes

The "footnotes" extra

(Note: This extra is still a little experimental. The final result will be almost exactly as now, but I want to make sure the generated output is as close to other Markdown implementations as reasonable and possible.)

Support for footnotes with the following syntax:

This is a paragraph with a footnote. [^note-id]

[^note-id]: This is the text of the note. 

Which produces HTML like this:

<p>This is a paragraph with a footnote. 
<sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref-note-id">
<a href="#fn-note-id">1</a></sup> 
</p>

...
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn-note-id">
<p>This is the text of the note.&nbsp;
<a href="#fnref-note-id" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>

<li>...for subsequent footnotes
</li>
</ol>
</div>

This is as close as I can tell is the favoured output from the following sources:

• http://daringfireball.net/2005/07/footnotes
• http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2005-August/001442.html
• http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2005-August/001480.html

Notes:

• I couldn't tell from the markdown-discuss discussion on footnotes whether John Gruber meant that the current date was added as a suffix to the anchors in his private Markdown.pl or whether he was literally putting in the "YYYY-MM-DD" strings in his markdown text.
• Daringfireball.net (John Gruber's) site uses the "footnoteBackLink" class on the backref <a>. Also, he does not add the class="footnote-ref" on <sup>. Neither of these jive with what was described here.
• Add hooks/variables on the Markdown class to allow easy tweaking of this output above.

Patch partly from Adam Gomaa (thanks Adam!).

(Return to Extras page.)