Once your Markdown pipeline supports footnotes, the temptation is to use them everywhere. But on a screen, footnotes work less well than they do in print: the jump-and-return breaks reading flow, and on mobile it is easy to lose your place on the way back.
An experiment in line-drawing
I reviewed every footnote in my older posts and sorted them into three buckets.
- Promoted into the body: prerequisites and warnings. Anything harmful to skip should never have been a footnote
- Converted to links: citations and primary sources. With careful anchor text they sit naturally in the prose
- Kept as footnotes: true asides, and version-specific behavioral trivia
Only about a fifth survived as footnotes; the rest read better as body text or links.
Implementation notes
Footnote syntax depends on a processor extension, so switching processors changes the output. The back-reference link’s aria-label is also whatever the processor decides — an accessibility audit flagged that once. Deciding to use footnotes sparingly keeps that dependency small too.
Takeaway
Treat footnotes as the place of last resort for material that would muddy the prose. Try the body first, then a link — the article comes out more honest that way.