Re: [Docutils-users] footnotes for rst2html5

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2021-05-30, Alan G. Isaac wrote:
> The rst2html5 writer follows the old treatment of writing HTML footnotes,
> but iiuc modern usage favors the use of an `aside` element (with ongoing
> discussion of adding `note` and `noteref` elements).

> Could the rst2html writer possibly move to the use of `aside`?

> Background discussions:

> - https://www.davidmacd.com/blog/html51-footnotes.html
> - http://kb.daisy.org/publishing/docs/html/notes.html

There is already a "future changes" entry in the RELEASE-NOTES (required
as advance-warning because this is a change to the API with a chance to
break existing applications (Sphinx uses "html5" as default HTML writer
and there are many custom stylesheets out "in the wild).

However, the jury is still out, whether footnotes are an "aside"¹ or more
closely related to the main text. IMV, ``role="note"``² is a better fit.

Günter

¹ The aside element represents a section of a page that consists of
  content that is tangentially related to the content of the parenting
  sectioning content, and which could be considered separate from that
  content. https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/sections.html#the-aside-element

² (note (role): A section whose content is parenthetic or ancillary to
  the main content of the resource.
  https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#note