I got round the footnotes issue by placing the source
link on the verbs in the text, while internal linking
is handled by nouns.
That's a very elegant idea; I congratulate you very genuinely. I wonder where you'd head if you had a third category of links, though?
The single biggest problem that gnaws at me is what to do when a single (hotspot|link|icon) needs to point the reader to two completely unrelated remote resources (e.g. a scholarly edition of some text where notes on the original manuscript and editorial additions refer to the same segment of text - or worse, overlapping segments.
In the print world, the only options are this kind of thing[1][2], or eschewing markers in the text in favour of references in the notes - but carrying either over when so many more options are available electronically feels lumpen to me. Drop-down menus are an obvious solution, but have huge dependency on the display agent to behave properly.
A popup or dropdown could be used to show multiple external links. We have found though that if we need to add an extra source, we simply add an extra sentence that has its own verb. For example:
Person A claims that Person B did something, but person C claims otherwise.
We use a different source links on each italicized verb. This works for us, due to the way we write posts, although there are some edge cases. It'd be interesting to see if it works for other sites with different requirements. The principle is to avoid footnotes and try to match the links meaning directly with the text. As the other poster mentioned, there perhaps should be a color distinction, or some other identifier.
The single biggest problem that gnaws at me is what to do when a single (hotspot|link|icon) needs to point the reader to two completely unrelated remote resources (e.g. a scholarly edition of some text where notes on the original manuscript and editorial additions refer to the same segment of text - or worse, overlapping segments.
In the print world, the only options are this kind of thing[1][2], or eschewing markers in the text in favour of references in the notes - but carrying either over when so many more options are available electronically feels lumpen to me. Drop-down menus are an obvious solution, but have huge dependency on the display agent to behave properly.
[edit: layout, phrasing]