Notes in the margins
Why this blog puts its footnotes where you can actually read them
Footnotes have a usability problem: they make you stop, jump to the bottom of the page, read, and find your place again. Tufte's fix is the sidenote — the same aside, set in the margin, right next to the sentence that earned it.Footnotes whose definitions appear in the margin instead of at the foot of the page. You're reading one now.
The version I reach for most is the margin note — a sidenote with no reference number at all. Which is the ideal home for a joke you don't want to commit to in the body text. It's perfect for an aside that would break the flow as a parenthetical but doesn't deserve a numbered citation.
Both come straight from Markdown. A numbered sidenote is just a normal footnote.
An unnumbered margin note is ^[{-} ...] inline, or a definition that starts
with {-}. No components, no shortcodes — I write prose and the asides land in
the margin on their own.
On a narrow screen there's no margin to put them in, so each note collapses to a tappable marker and expands inline. Same source, no JavaScript, no second copy to maintain.The whole thing is a CSS checkbox toggle — a trick borrowed straight from Tufte CSS.