If only there were an easy, standard way to pop up a temporary "tooltip window" within a page. At that point, clicking on a footnote would pop up the actual footnote, rather than scrolling the browser to the bottom of the page.

(Putting footnotes within the page itself causes the page to be wider, which could potentially make the article harder to read on mobile devices. But at this point, a Javascript "popup window" solution would probably be worse.)

<abbr title="it is usually used for abbreviations, but why not?">abbr tag</abbr>

The djangobook does it quite nicely (not footnotes but it would work either way).