I see it as an issue of managing & exposing the length. Some readers want to go as deep as you can take them, but others are frustrated if you block them from moving on. I deal with it by use of collapsible sections+abstracts, margin notes, and explicit topics in list items.
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Replying to @gwern @michael_nielsen
It's more aggressive in using the overall hierarchical tree structure of each page in showing/hiding: the reader can read (in increasing depth) page abstract, then by headers, then skim margin notes+item summaries, then read body text, then uncollapse regions to read those too.
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Replying to @gwern @michael_nielsen
I don't know how well it all works, but I seem to see fewer complaints about my pages being unreadably long, anyway. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾
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Replying to @gwern
You're another writer who I'd happily read at 2x the length. And for your particular style, I think your navigation signposting works well - I do sometimes skim e.g., long lists of mostly references.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen
Yeah. The link annotations have also been helpful in taming *perceived* length: before, I wanted too much to include all the abstracts/interesting excerpts, but even with floating footnotes, they were very in the reader's face. With the popups, they give reader control of depth.
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Replying to @gwern @michael_nielsen
For lack of a better term, I'm calling this approach "structural reading" (like "structural editors") - instead of forcing all readers to read at a fixed depth, providing either too little or too much, make the structure visible & controllable so they can adjust depth easily.
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Replying to @gwern @michael_nielsen
This is very cool! I seem to recall Dream Machines suggested a physical lever you could pull up or down to get more/less detail continuously. That’s probably difficult and overkill but the general principle seems importantly right
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Replying to @Meaningness @michael_nielsen
I'm not surprised. Folding/structural editing/'orthodox editors' were widespread in the early Engelbart/Lisp/hypertext ecosystems, and it's very obvious to apply that to docs as much as code. One could add a scrollbar to go through the levels I describe. All HTML, after all.
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(This scrollbar wouldn't necessarily be too useful for me, unfortunately, because most of the structure has been added only relatively recently, and it's a lot of work to retrofit collapsed sections/margin notes/list highlights/link-annotations onto pre-September-2019 stuff.)
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@Westoncb's Variable Level-of-detail Documents is a neat realization of this idea on the web via inline expansions. One could also imagine adding a global "expansion depth" that controls all expansions, tied to a slider of sorts. http://symbolflux.com/lodessay/ pic.twitter.com/vFSSQOHMpr2 replies 1 retweet 22 likes
Oh, nice, thanks for the pointer! cc @andy_matuschak in case he doesn’t know about this
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Replying to @Meaningness @yoshikischmitz and
There have been so many attempts at StretchText-like interfaces over the decades! Most approaches (including this one) break object permanence in a way that I find very disruptive to fluid reading. LiquidText is maybe my favorite impl.
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Replying to @andy_matuschak @Meaningness and
RE: object permanence, I wonder if you could hit a middle-ground between this and
@gwern's hover-previews(nice for quick looks) by showing these expansions in a hover menu with a "pin" button, which when clicked, would insert the expansion into the document itself.1 reply 0 retweets 1 like - 7 more replies
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