Stretchtext or Bust – Ted Nelson’s unrealized vision | Hacker News Reader

Stretchtext or Bust – Ted Nelson’s unrealized vision

billwadge.com

27 pointsherodotus12 comments

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I never noticed it on Meduza. Thank you for mentioning.

It doesn't seem to me that Агенство and Медуза 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.

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 (под катом [pət 'katəm] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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