[HN Gopher] Stretchtext or Bust - Ted Nelson's unrealized vision
___________________________________________________________________
Stretchtext or Bust - Ted Nelson's unrealized vision
Author : herodotus
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-02-24 15:32 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (billwadge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (billwadge.com)
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Like transcopyright, this is another terrible idea. Text is good.
| It doesn't need to be, and shouldn't be dynamic or interactive;
| you just need adequate means of finding the text you mean to
| read.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'd like to use this to write math textbooks. You start with it
| fully expanded and as the reader learns definitions and proves
| theorems it becomes simpler and simpler until eventually it's
| just a few sentences.
|
| If you still don't understand it, you can expand parts back into
| more detailed arguments and revisit whatever topic you missed on
| the first pass.
|
| If students don't understand something, they can manipulate its
| structure until only the part that the don't understand is
| exposed and then send a permalink to that view when asking for
| help.
| layer8 wrote:
| Once we have computers embedded into the brain, we can
| automatically generate stretchtext based on crowdsourced
| statistics about the parts that the audience tends to mentally
| skip over or dismiss. Then recurse.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The only current example of this technique that I know of is the
| in-universe encyclopedia of the (brilliant but humongous)
| transhumanist Madoka fic _To the Stars_ [1]. It's utilized there
| mainly to instill a certain ... SCP-ish feeling of vague paranoia
| in the reader, though, not for the original purpose.
|
| [1] https://archiveofourown.org/works/777002
| groby_b wrote:
| This is a neat idea, but ignores the cost of writing for
| stretchtext.
|
| Hyperlinks are a one-time annotation, and their presence does not
| change the underlying text. Stretchtext means a combinatorial
| explosion of possible readings - and if you've spent any time on
| the Internet you know you need to vet them all, or somebody
| _will_ misquote you.
|
| It still might be useful in an educational context, but even
| there I have my doubts. All the examples I'm aware of (e.g.
| http://tomasp.net/coeffects/ ) do, for me, not gain in clarity or
| readability.
|
| There is an underlying idea about having text that is modified
| according to your ideas that sounds neat, but I haven't seen any
| practical execution yet that's particularly compelling. For
| educational text, the most potentially useful thing I've seen so
| far are is https://quantum.country/ which embeds spaced
| repetition.
|
| It's a space that's ripe for a breakthrough. I'm curious to see
| what it'll be.
| jerf wrote:
| I played with this on the web circa 2000.
|
| The conclusion I came to is that the effort spent writing the
| various stretchtext possibilities, and it is quite considerable
| effort, is better spent just making your writing better in the
| first place.
|
| I think that will be true regardless of the human-based
| implementation.
|
| AI shrinking tech might work, but even so, it's a delicate
| operation. It's so easy to drop a "not", or a more complicated
| equivalent, that makes the summary not actually what you said,
| and if we're back to "human reviews the AI attempt at shrinking
| your text" we're back to "the effort is probably better spent
| improving your writing".
|
| There's also a problem where assuming a decent reader, the
| cognitive load of deciding whether to stretch the text,
| performing the requisite UI action, re-acquiring the text you
| just manipulated and re-reading it, is not entirely dissimilar
| from the cognitive effort of just reading the full text in the
| first place. By the time the amount of text you're hiding is
| worth all that, you probably should have linked to a real page,
| or just used a footnote, which is basically a centuries-old
| tried & true mechanism for "stretch text" that everyone knows
| what to do with.
|
| Relative to the benefit, it's a lot of cost on both producer
| and consumer.
| bade wrote:
| You're right, writing stretch text with current HTML
| authoring tools is not practical. My MMP system was practical
| but the MMP server side software was a challenge to implement
| and now it's gone. But it will rise again!
| necovek wrote:
| This is about the unrealised potential of semantic web, where
| reader would be in control.
|
| Plenty of good ideas, but they do not necessarilly translate to
| modern web which is apps for the most part.
| kemitchell wrote:
| I've seen this done, and effectively. Site in Russian:
|
| https://www.agents.media/rutube-kremlin/
|
| Basically, instead of footnote markers, you present ellipses
| inline. When readers click the ellipses, the page expands
| additional text in place. That can be a separate sentence or a
| continuation of the contextual one.
|
| If you reach an ellipsis and you want to know more, you click it.
| Or you don't. There's no page-wide lever for level of detail.
| It's more granular than that. There's also a summary and outline
| at the top.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| This technique was also used by (at least) the ill-fated
| English version of The Correspondent and the still-surviving
| (if almost banned) Russian media outlet Meduza. It's kind of
| awkward on touchscreens, though, and near-unusable with (stock)
| keyboard navigation. I haven't really seen a case where it
| would have an advantage over sidenotes on a wide screen.
| kemitchell wrote:
| I never noticed it on Meduza. Thank you for mentioning.
|
| It doesn't seem to me that Agenstvo and Meduza are using the
| same content management system. I wonder: Is there a longer
| history of this kind of expandable note in the Russian
| blogosphere? It feels very Art Lebedev to me, but I couldn't
| say why.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Not that I know of, no. The Russian blogosphere as I knew
| it in its heyday (not very well) just used whatever
| LiveJournal was capable of producing without much
| configuration, for the most part, so you had the "cut" used
| to delimit either the hook or an abstract ( _pod katom_
| [p@t 'kat@m] is used as the rough Runet-speak equivalent
| of "below the fold" even today), but not much else.
|
| As best as I can tell it was around the time of the
| English-language The Correspondent hype (either pre- or
| post-launch--I remember there was a whole section about
| this one gimmick in the marketing materials) that Meduza
| introduced these quasi-footnotes, so I guess I just assumed
| they saw them there and decided they wanted the same thing
| for themselves. No idea about the real history though.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-24 23:02 UTC)