balloontext and footnotes - what's the difference?

[James Lowe]

Hello,

Sorry to seem to be obsessing about 'footnotes', it's just that when one does 
start to look at all the nuances of a new function to make clear documentation, 
one's focus does become a bit tunnel-vision-like.

Looking at NR 1.7.2 (Balloon Text) and my proposed patch

http://codereview.appspot.com/4751045/ for Footnotes;

I'm wondering now what the *real* difference between the two are, other than 
\footnote[Grob] lets you add a footnote to a balloon text - albeit without the 
'balloon'.

Is this just the same core function with a 'bit of extra' either way - where 
the intersect is that I get annotated grobs/text  - and the non-intersect parts 
of this Euler diagram is that one has a balloon around it or one has a footnote 
attached to it? Now if I can just add \box markup to a \footnote[Grob] then why 
is this significantly different to balloon text, and if not different shouldn't 
we be deprecating balloon text or modifying \footnote[Grob] and incoporating 
them into balloon text from a code point of view?

This is probably a GLISS candidate but I'm starting to feel that either NR 
1.7.2 needs moving to NR 3.x.x (where footnotes are going to be - I forget 
exactly now writing this) or vice versa.

James