René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Use footnotes for numbered notes in tables","articleBody":"# Documentation\n\nIn a few places, the docs include tables with numbered notes, similar to this:\n\n\u003e | Cheese        | In Stock     |\n\u003e |---------------|--------------|\n\u003e | Red Leicester | no           |\n\u003e | Camembert     | yes (1) (2)  |\n\u003e \n\u003e (1)  it's a bit runny\n\u003e (2)  the cat's eaten it\n\nOften the notes are written using simple numbered lists, which notably don't create links between the note references and their definitions. This can make viewing the notes somewhat tedious, particularly when the table is very long or when the same notes are shared by multiple tables.\n\nAnother way to format these notes is using Sphinx [footnotes](https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/basics.html#footnotes). Footnotes have the benefit of creating bi-directional links between the note entries and their references, which makes viewing a note and then navigating back to where you were much easier. The footnote definitions can be placed anywhere in the docs, so in particular they can be placed immediately after the table that references them. This is already done for a few tables in the current docs, e.g. in [`collections.abc`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.abc.html#collections-abstract-base-classes).\n\nI propose migrating some of the existing table notes to footnotes in cases where having the extra navigation links would be helpful. In particular, I think this would be useful for the [format code tables in the `datetime` docs](https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-format-codes).\n\nThe result would look something like this:\n\n\u003e | Cheese        | In Stock      |\n\u003e |---------------|---------------|\n\u003e | Red Leicester | no            |\n\u003e | Camembert     | yes [^1] [^2] |\n\u003e \n\u003e [^1]: it's a bit runny\n\u003e [^2]: the cat's eaten it\n\n\u003c!-- gh-linked-prs --\u003e\n### Linked PRs\n* gh-137743\n\u003c!-- /gh-linked-prs --\u003e\n","author":{"url":"https://github.com/brianschubert","@type":"Person","name":"brianschubert"},"datePublished":"2025-08-13T23:51:38.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":1},"url":"https://github.com/137742/cpython/issues/137742"}