Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

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!

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