[HN Gopher] StretchText
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StretchText
Author : dbrereton
Score : 71 points
Date : 2022-07-23 12:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| carapace wrote:
| See also "zooming" UIs:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface
|
| (A fun simple demo of zooming in JS
| https://josephernest.github.io/bigpicture.js/index.html )
|
| And hyperbolic geometry for layout?
| hansword wrote:
| The way this is described it reminds me of the <details> and
| <summary> tags in HTML, most often used for spoilers.
|
| But I am not sure if I understood it correctly. This might be
| more for different level of comprehension (eli5?).
| ksaj wrote:
| I'm as baffled as you. I did find this that may or may not
| help. It only very barely helped me.
| https://ia904500.us.archive.org/32/items/STRETCHTEXT/STRETCH...
|
| It sounds like you have to write multiple versions of the text,
| and then if the user grabs one of the markers and "stretches"
| it, the next-most detailed version of the text will get loaded.
|
| But I could be very wrong. It is extraordinarily difficult to
| find something concrete as a demo. I gave up on link after link
| of the same description with no actual demo anywhere.
| NateEag wrote:
| My brother-in-law built a very small demo to advertise an
| implementation of StretchText he made years ago:
|
| https://natematias.com/stretchtext/
|
| I don't recall whether he ever built anything larger with
| that.
| baliex wrote:
| > It is extraordinarily difficult to find something concrete
| as a demo.
|
| I think that's because it would be extraordinarily difficult
| to write something good using StretchText. It would amazing
| if it could be done, but the amount of effort needed to do so
| is probably the main reason why no-one does.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| With the advances in machine learning, I wonder if you
| couldn't automate it. Write the most detailed level and
| have some ML model generate the ever more high-level
| summaries.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Yes, exactly. This is also applicable to building good
| prompts for language models from larger document sets.
|
| Here is an example of using Github page summaries to seed
| knowledge in discussing various topics with GPT-3:
| https://github.com/daveshap/LongtermChatExternalSources
| NamTaf wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I'm interpreting it as a sort of
| analogous system to Word's autosummary feature. That is, You
| put in a complete text, and then have periodically briefer
| summaries of it (perhaps in sections, such as paragraphs?). You
| start with the summarised version, but then as the reader
| stretches out the text, it dynamically provides more detail in
| the areas that are stretched out.
|
| e: For those like me who just went looking, apparently
| autosummary was removed in Word 2010, which given I had 2007
| til about 2 years ago and thus didn't realise it was missing :)
|
| Here's a description of it:
| https://www.officetooltips.com/word_2007/tips/getting_to_the...
| re wrote:
| This reminds me of something I've seen online where a short piece
| of writing is initially shown in an extremely abridged form, like
| "I made tea". Many of the words are clickable and are recursively
| expandable, repeated replacing individual words with phrases or
| inserting dependent clauses for more color, until you end up with
| a whole paragraph of a short of prose poetry.
|
| Edit: found it: Telescopic Text. The website is down right now
| but the web archive works:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220316001859/http://www.telesc...
|
| Discussed here 11 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2551120
| georgestrakhov wrote:
| The website is not down. It's moved
| https://www.telescopictext.org/texts/
| scrivna wrote:
| In practice it seems like we do this all the time.
|
| "TLDR" summaries seem like this.
|
| Those knowledge graph snippets on Google seems like this.
|
| The first paragraph of many news stories seem like this.
|
| The first answer on a Quora page before you have to login seems
| like this.
|
| Other than like an actual specific technical "feature"
| implementation it seems like this is everywhere in my life.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Another significant example is Wikipedia. Compare the English
| vs. Simple English version of "engine":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine
|
| https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine
|
| Abstracts and book summaries are another large category of
| something similar being done "in the wild".
| NeoTar wrote:
| Whilst the outcome of the simple English wikipedia may agree
| with this, the intention is different; I believe the articles
| in simple English could (and should) be as long as the
| regular articles, but written with a reduced and simpler
| vocabulary.
| Zhyl wrote:
| Reminds me of Nicky Case's "Nutshell" [0]
|
| [0] https://ncase.me/nutshell-wip/
| toomim wrote:
| Here's a cool guy who's entire homepage is one giant stretchtext!
|
| https://andrewcantino.com/
|
| It starts with three short sentences, but expands into three full
| pages once you've stretched it all out.
| kemitchell wrote:
| I'd sure go for a standardized inline HTML tag that expands in UI
| like <details>. Semantics like a footnote, perhaps.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| The equivalent of seam carving for images?
| thih9 wrote:
| I'm not sure this is a good analogy, seam carving removes the
| most common parts of an image and the details remain (and here
| the reader at first sees a generic overview and the details are
| hidden).
| Mizza wrote:
| Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I've seen this happen
| inadvertently due to "responsive design" - mobile views of the
| same page will display less detail. It's kind of a bad practice,
| but I see in the wild all the time.
| bloaf wrote:
| I've seen this used for humorous effect in Twine style games,
| like this one:
|
| https://xrafstar.monster/games/twine/sauna/
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Reminds me of Orteil's Nested (same author as Cookie Clicker). A
| gamedev adaptation of this idea would be interesting.
|
| http://orteil.dashnet.org/nested
| masswerk wrote:
| Marginally related: HyperScope by bootstrap.org (Doug Engelbart
| Institute). This is somewhat similar by providing hierarchical
| views into complex documents and referencing sections by ID, but
| is more realistic by doing this by a linear drilldown only.
|
| [1] https://hyperscope.org
|
| [2] https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/154/86/
|
| [3] https://github.com/BradNeuberg/hyperscope
|
| Note regarding realism: In my naivety, I once expected option-
| based content organization and composition, much like in
| StretchText, to become an inevitable feature of multi-platform
| presentation, when mobile clients arrived. Surely, there was no
| way to present content in a manner that would suit needs both for
| mobile presentation and traditional desktop presentations at once
| (regarding length, level of detail and feature richness), posing
| a serious economic challenge for any content production. Well,
| then we got mobile first. ;-)
| jdougan wrote:
| Have they fixed the Firefox 2.0/XSLT dependency in Hyperscope
| yet?
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| I was going to link to this; top form fellow Engelbartian!
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Now if we only had this for diagrams.
| bade wrote:
| You might want to check out my (Bill Wadge's) blog post on
| stretch text https://billwadge.com/2022/02/24/stretchtext-or-
| bust-ted-nel...
| pbw wrote:
| I think that AI will deliver a form of StrechText for every
| document, plus video and audio. It will condense the media down
| to any length you want.
|
| A funny example of this is many people pad their YouTube videos
| out to 10+ minutes because they do better that way. With AI
| you'll be able to request a short version of that video. At which
| point the AI will squeeze out the duplication the human purposely
| added in to satisfy the algorithm.
| cobertos wrote:
| Doesn't Google already try this with showing relevant snippets
| of YouTube videos in search? It never seemed to work
| _excellent_, still have to manually scrub, get the context, etc
| staindk wrote:
| See comments by the "autotldr" reddit bot[1] - IMO it is very
| good at generating summaries of articles.
|
| Also see this post[2] for some info on how it works.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/user/autotldr
|
| [2]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotl...
| brody_hamer wrote:
| Smmry is also good. https://smmry.com
| dymk wrote:
| Well, the content of the video may be condensed, but they'll
| absolutely be putting the same number of ad-rolls in the video.
| jl6 wrote:
| Let's hope so! And also for similar treatment for some of the
| 19th century literary classics whose authors were paid by the
| word.
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