I publish a lot of text online, and even wrote a system to format HTML for me. Now, I have a problem: I want to make sidenotes in HTML pages just like books have. Just to explain, sidenotes are those notes in the margins right next to the main body text.
Does anyone know of a good, reliable way to do them -- preferably with plain CSS rather than JavaScript. Thanks!
Ok, made this much more browser friendly (FF3, IE7/8, Chrome):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html>
<head>
<title>Layout</title>
<style type="text/css">
html, body, #wrapper { height: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0; }
body { background-color: #666; width: 100%; text-align: center; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; }
#wrapper { width: 960px; margin: 0 auto; background: white; padding: 20px 0; }
#page { width: 660px; margin: 0 auto; text-align: justify; }
div.sidenote-left { float: left; margin-left: -150px; }
div.sidenote-right { float: right; margin-right: -150px; }
div.sidenote-left, div.sidenote-right { width: 150px; text-align: left; }
div.sidenote-left div, div.sidenote-right div { margin: 0 10px; border: 1px solid #666; padding: 4px; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="page">
<p>In the 90s we saw the rise of GUIs (yes I know Macs were around in the 80s but GUIs became the standard for everyone once Windows took hold). This transition had many casualties like Lotus 1-2-3 (which was basically killed by Excel on Windows) and Wordperfect (MS Word killed it). Now you can argue that MS had the inside track since they also produced Windows and you'd be right but beyond that I think MS adjusted to the change quicker than anyone else.</p>
<p>Borland was still an agile little company back then. It adjusted and took its highly successful Turbo Pascal and created Delphi.</p>
<div class="sidenote-left"><div>See Chapter 7 for further explanation</div></div>
<p>Now truly compiled languages ruled the roost in the 1990s with the exception of one little upstart: Java, which was something basically new. It was sorta compiled, sorta interpreted (being compiled into machine-independent bytecode that ran on a virtual machine). I personally think that the rise of both Java and Netscape scared the absolute bejesus out of Microsoft in the late 90s.</p>
<div class="sidenote-right"><div>See Chapter 9 for further explanation</div></div>
<p>Borland adjusted reasonably well producing what was really the first really successful Java IDE in JBuilder.</p>
<p>They were fending off a resurgent Microsoft who also produced successive versions of Visual Studio that (imho) were years ahead of their time in the late 90s. I can remember coding Visual C++ with MTS (microsoft Transaction Server) DCOM objects over 10 years ago and that was a precursor to the modern application server platform we have today. Remote debugging and the like were things that were (or at least seemed) light years ahead on Visual Studio.</p>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Note: in response to the text selection issue, I tried it with absolute positioning, which you can do by changing this CSS:
div.sidenote-left { position: absolute; margin-left: -150px; }
div.sidenote-right { position: absolute; margin-left: 660px; }
but it still selects the text.
The only way I see around this is to change your page into a 2/3 column format where the side notes are in other columns. The only problem with this is that you lose the ability to move the notes in relation to the text. Or at least I can't think of a way around that.
If you're lazy, use a CSS framework! One of the easiest frameworks you can use is 960.gs. This will help you accomplish exactly what you're trying to do in minutes.