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Love the Tufte style. One real limitation, however, is the "mobile view" in which the margin notes collapse into clickable superscript numbers. I don't think it

Love the Tufte style. One real limitation, however, is the "mobile view" in which the margin notes collapse into clickable superscript numbers. I don't think it's clear to most readers that one is supposed to click on those to expand them, meaning they aren't likely read by perhaps 50% of your readers. One thing I've seen, and adapted for my own site [1], is inserting these margin notes beneath the paragraph in mobile mode; this way, the notes do not go unread. [1] http://cachestocaches.com http://cachestocaches.com

_bxg1 8y ago
I would say just make the links look more like links. Make them a tasteful blue. Hook into that existing visual language everyone is familiar with.
Eiriksmal 8y ago
Gregory, your margin notes look great in the mobile view. I'm using mine as "frenetic" textual additions (thanks for the great description, HN commenter!), which would be too messy to inject straight into the content without a click-to-reveal. It's a nice reminder, however, that search engines suck up the margin notes and inject them in the text where they find them. I noticed my site is indexed in Bing/DDG with the circle-cross icon in the middle of the text. I've been placing them so they line up nicely with the paragraph they're found in, but that doesn't lend to a very mobile-friendly reading experience. A solution where I use eg cornflowerblue underlined icons, as suggested in the sibling comment, would be a solid solution for my personal use-case.
- xixixao 8y ago
  For me it was weird having to tap around (to open and to close) in such a fluid article. It was distracting in a way. I would suggest trying to simply insert them into parentheses on mobile, perhaps heavily grayed out if you want to deemphasize, or if they're not that important drop them altogether.
kqr 8y ago
That they're not visible on mobile is a feature, in my mind. The mobile reader is on the go and wants the short version without flavour text. At least, that's why I did it the way I did at https://two-wrongs.com https://two-wrongs.com.

_bxg1 8y ago

I would say just make the links look more like links. Make them a tasteful blue. Hook into that existing visual language everyone is familiar with.

Eiriksmal 8y ago

Gregory, your margin notes look great in the mobile view. I'm using mine as "frenetic" textual additions (thanks for the great description, HN commenter!), which would be too messy to inject straight into the content without a click-to-reveal. It's a nice reminder, however, that search engines suck up the margin notes and inject them in the text where they find them. I noticed my site is indexed in Bing/DDG with the circle-cross icon in the middle of the text. I've been placing them so they line up nicely with the paragraph they're found in, but that doesn't lend to a very mobile-friendly reading experience. A solution where I use eg cornflowerblue underlined icons, as suggested in the sibling comment, would be a solid solution for my personal use-case.

xixixao 8y ago
For me it was weird having to tap around (to open and to close) in such a fluid article. It was distracting in a way. I would suggest trying to simply insert them into parentheses on mobile, perhaps heavily grayed out if you want to deemphasize, or if they're not that important drop them altogether.

kqr 8y ago

That they're not visible on mobile is a feature, in my mind. The mobile reader is on the go and wants the short version without flavour text. At least, that's why I did it the way I did at https://two-wrongs.com https://two-wrongs.com.