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One big roadblock for environments hoping to improve on the book with fancy interactive elements: they all require reading on a screen! And reading on a screen is almost universally terrible! I've been getting increasingly worried about this—seems like a serious threat! (con't)
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Of course there are on-screen features which enhance expert reading… but on balance, I'm pretty reliably a worse reader when reading on screens. Not thrilled about needing to solve those problems in addition to all the tools-for-thought ones! What do you find promising here?
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What if navigation wasn’t through arbitrary chunks (pages) but aligned with the structure of the content (sections > paragraphs > sentences)? Too much effort goes into transforming trees into sequences (writing) and back (reading). What if we just kept the trees? (fig. and lit.)
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"API design" is harder than it looks; requires careful, explicit thought. notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_note Prose—even outline-oriented prose—doesn't naturally lend itself to that kind of composition.
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writing 101 says “each thought gets its own paragraph” so even the Fancy New Wave tools treat paragraphs as building blocks of thought they are not line breaks are semantic. line breaks aren’t semantic. you can’t tell which is true until the piece is done!
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Fully agree. Can’t quite make the connection to my earlier tweet (assuming it’s a response). Have you read about Robert E. Horn’s Information Mapping? A somewhat extreme approach that only applies in specific contexts, but insights on improving scanning and reference seem useful.