Andy Matuschak on Twitter: "@Meaningness @yoshikischmitz @gwern @michael_nielsen @Westoncb 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." / Twitter

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Michael is back in San Francisco, soon in Santa Fe

Feb 20, 2020

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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David Chapman

@Meaningness

Feb 20, 2020

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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'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. symbolflux.com/lodessay/

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David Chapman

@Meaningness

Feb 20, 2020

Oh, nice, thanks for the pointer! cc

@andy_matuschak

in case he doesn’t know about this

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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.

12:38 AM · Feb 21, 2020Twitter Web App

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An important related consideration is "interaction considered harmful": ideally, the user should do as little as possible to access the ideal information. Lots of little buttons are a painful way to indicate intent; scrolling through thoughtful section hierarchy somewhat better.

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I think I would describe my experience of reading wikipedia as variable level of detail.

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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.

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yoshiki

@yoshikischmitz

Feb 21, 2020

The reader could then decide what parts they want to just preview, and which ones they want to keep around, actively participating in the structure of the document, but without contstant reflows of the main text as in the original prototype.

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