Footnotes are bits of text tagged on at the end, like Wikipedia for instance. UBook semantically tags them so they are available where the note exists in the book. Presumably a popup or panel when you touch or click the note marker in the text. It was a bad use of words. It was meant to convey the idea you didn't jump to the end of the chapter or book to read a note. HTML-based formats just use anchors.
Yes, compiler is ambiguous. The idea behind it is a clean interim language a writing tool could export to, and software could then adapt to other formats like Kindle etc.
I must be misreading that. How is lack of support for footnotes and endnotes a positive feature, as opposed to a glaringly missing feature?
> saving the compiler the job of managing complex code.
I re-read this 6 times, trying to figure it out. You mean, the human who creates the book?
On technical forums, I suggest you not use "compiler" in that sense, because we are accustomed to its technical meaning, of software that translates computer language.
On a positive note, I like markdown, and I dislike creating and reading XML by hand (although it works ok for software to deal with), so this seems like a fine idea to me.