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Give footnotes the boot

Jake Archibald · 1 Jul 2025

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Footnotes are a hack for print's limitations and do not belong on the web, which has no such limitations.

    Their wordsFootnotes 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.

  2. Our reading

    Letting readers skip over less-relevant content is a normal, unremarkable part of reading that does not need special design solutions.

    Their wordsSkipping over less-relevant content is a normal part of reading. We don't need to over-engineer it.

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