When David Foster Wallace’s heavily footnoted and annotated “Host” was originally published in The Atlanticit looked like this: 

The colored footnotes were a unique challenge to present online, but The Atlantic web team did a pretty decent job by using hyperlinks and pop-up boxes (archived link here): 

And then later, for the print collection Consider The Lobster, the footnotes lost their colors and were replaced with arrows and boxes:

The Atlantichas recently redesigned “Host” so that the footnotes expand within the piece like so: 

It works particularly well with footnotes-within-footnotes:

This is one of the rare times that I think reading a piece online is now actually easier andmore delightful than reading it in print.

It should be mentioned, by the way, that the eBook of Consider The Lobster doesn’t even contain the piece:

Read “Host” in its entirety here.

A few of these images were grabbed from “David Foster Wallace’s different Hosts.”

(h/t jimray > flickerfusion)