notes in the margin

notes in the margin, safe offramps in the rabbit warren

"Throw me back in the briar patch" - Br'er Rabbit

"I prayed for a mission. For my sins, they gave me one" - Captain Willard

I had a front end styling motivation for a moment today and went down a rabbit hole on Tufte sidenoteslike this and now understand it to be a ligitmate alternative to rampant parenthesized commentary. A sidenote keeps the aside beside the linedoing a job similar to what jwz wanted in bidirectional "intertwingled" links instead of exiling it to the foot of the page.

This is the first post rendered through a small 3bmd extension to "3bmd" in the source becomes the margin note — so I'm testing it live before it goes anywhere else.

The CSS that floats these into the margin lives in the theme now, not herewhich is the joke: the one bit of styling that can't go in the post is the sidenotes' own — 3bmd escapes an inline <style>, so it moved into a forked theme.

"It's a mess, ain't it sheriff?"

"If it ain't, it'll do 'til the mess gets here." Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men