# Could long footnotes be scrollable?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/could-long-footnotes-be-scrollable/409613
**Category:** Feature
**Tags:** footnote, fixed
**Created:** [August 9, 2026, 3:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/could-long-footnotes-be-scrollable/409613 "2026-08-09T03:16:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 7
### Author:  [@zogstrip](https://meta.discourse.org/u/zogstrip)
#### Post date: [August 11, 2026, 1:45pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/could-long-footnotes-be-scrollable/409613/7 "2026-08-11T13:45:59Z")
This should hopefully make long footnotes better π
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> FloatKit gives a tooltip a fixed \`maxWidth\` and no height limit at all. That is β¦fine for the short labels most tooltips carry, but it breaks down as soon as one holds user content β footnotes, chat reaction lists and event descriptions all render arbitrary-length HTML into a tooltip, and the result is a popup bigger than the screen it has to fit on.
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> Neither axis recovers on its own, because floating-ui's \`shift\` can only \*move\* a float, never shrink it.
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> \*\*Vertically\*\* it clamps the popup flush under the header and leaves the rest below the fold. Because the float is re-anchored to its trigger on every scroll, its viewport rectangle never changes, so the hidden part cannot be reached by scrolling β the page just slides underneath it. Measured on a 390Γ664 phone with a long footnote: a 1557px popup with 945px permanently unreachable, and swiping inside it scrolled the page from 871 to 1381 while revealing nothing.
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> \*\*Horizontally\*\* the same clamp pins a 350px popup 10px from the left edge of a 320px screen, so the overflow joins the document's scrollable area and the whole page β header included β can be panned sideways (42px, growing with each pan).
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> \## What changed
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> \- \`.fk-d-tooltip\_\_inner-content\` is bounded to \`60dvh\` and scrolls, which is what menus have done since they gained \`overflow: auto\`. Tooltips kept the \`overflow: hidden\` they were born with and were simply never revisited, so the asymmetry was drift rather than a decision.
> \- Alignment becomes \`align-items: safe center\` at the same time. The cross axis is the one being capped, so plain \`center\` would centre content that is too tall and push its first lines above the scrollport, where scrolling cannot follow β measured at 830px out of reach.
> \- \`maxWidth\` is clamped against the space the viewport actually leaves, derived from the same padding \`shift\` keeps clear so the two cannot disagree.
> \- Only \*numeric\* \`maxWidth\` values are clamped. The option also accepts CSS keywords (the user card passes \`unset\`), and wrapping a keyword in \`min()\` is invalid CSS β the browser would drop the declaration and hand the float to whatever stylesheet rule was previously being overridden.
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> \`overflow-x\` stays \`hidden\` rather than becoming \`auto\`: the same rule carries \`overflow-wrap: break-word\`, so \`auto\` on both axes would give tooltips a horizontal scrollbar for unbreakable content.
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> \## Before / after
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> A long footnote on a 390px-wide phone, and the same popup after swiping inside it:
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> | | Before | After |
> |---|---|---|
> | popup height | 1557px | 400px |
> | clipped below the fold | 945px | 0 |
> | scrollable | no | yes (1157px of scroll) |
> | swiping inside it | scrolls the page, popup unchanged | scrolls the footnote, page stays put |
> | 320px screen | 352px wide, page pans 42px | 302px wide, no pan |
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> \## Testing
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> \- \`d-tooltip-test.gjs\` gains a height/scroll test and a keyword-\`maxWidth\` test, and the two numeric \`maxWidth\` cases are folded into one. Each new assertion was checked to fail against the specific declaration it guards: dropping \`safe\`, \`box-sizing\`, or \`max-height\` each turn the scroll test red, and wrapping keywords in \`min()\` turns the keyword test red.
> \- A footnote system spec covers the end-to-end mobile case at 320px β real cooked content, real touch scroll, and the document-level horizontal overflow that a rendering test cannot observe.
> \- Ran the tooltip- and menu-heavy core system specs (cards, user tips, filter navigation, styleguide, localization menus, composer, bookmarks, chat reactions, calendar) β ~200 examples, no new failures.
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