Le blog personnel de Joe Clark | Footnotes are like unicorns, continuing a discussion on how to mark up footnotes. Clark briefly mentions Gruber's thoughts on whether they are footnotes at all; or endnotes. I have to say, they are endnotes. On the web, we do not have have “pages” in the same sense that a book does; so all notes will be at the end of the document. So they're endnotes.

As for a glyph... I wonder how many people truly know what most glyphs mean. But in any case, the hooked arrow reminds me of the Enter key on my keyboard. Meaning start a new line, or submit something and go elsewhere. So, while it might look nifty it doesn't really describe what's happening. Up arrow seems a little “iffy” to me since I'm not totally convinced it has semantic meaning along the lines of “return to a specific place”. To me it just says “go up in a nonspecific way”.

Perhaps an up arrow with a horizontal line would work. Like |← but vertical. I'm afraid I have no idea what that is actually called, nor whether there's a glyph.The glyph is “Upwards Arrow to Bar” (as Zeldman would say, hat tip to Joe Clark :)). However, I've seen that sort of notation used to describe the precise limit of a measurement (my father was an architect so I saw lots of plans) and that does seem to describe the concept of “return to a specific place above”.

On an unrelated note, I cannot understand why people think we standards advocates are obsessed with minutiae.