Footnote links in short descriptions do not work

[ojeda]

For instance, https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/pin/index.html#macros contains pin!, and its short description (i.e. the docblock-short) has the footnotes, but clicking those does not work. The footnotes work, of course, when clicking them in the pin! page at https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/pin/macro.pin.html.

There are several ways to resolve the issue, e.g. making the links in the short descriptions point to the page containing the footnotes, or removing footnote links from short descriptions, or removing the link but keeping the text, or adding the footnotes in the page with the short descriptions somehow, etc.

[workingjubilee]

Footnotes are flow-breaking and the definition of these terms is very important for understanding, so we should probably remove the footnotes and uplift the definitions. It is important that these documents remain legible and can be traversed in "source form", if they are dependent on the rustdoc formatting (which is unstable) they have failed to exploit the basic capabilities of Markdown, which raises the question of why we are still using it if we do not expect the raw text form to be easy to read.

[Noratrieb]

#108973 touches these docs again

[est31]

Footnotes could open a pop up or something, or have a hover text.

[GuillaumeGomez]

I opened #109351.

@est31: The problem with hover text is that it doesn't work on mobile, so that leaves us with the popup option: it would require a new color for footnote references. Not sure if it's a good idea or not. I personally like the current display where the footnote definitions are after the text.

[camelid]

Hiding the footnote altogether in the short description seems a bit unfortunate to me. I can imagine situations where the footnote has important caveats that someone reading the short description should know. I wonder how hard it would be to link the short-description footnote to the footnote definition on the item's page as ojeda suggested? Another (less good) option is having a pop-up that says "Footnotes not available in doc summaries." or something like that.

[workingjubilee]

I believe this has been resolved for the cases in question, so I am closing this.

[ojeda]

Thanks!