Ooohhh this one's gonna be a big hit, I can feel it.
Conversation
Next level is sidenotes in the right referencing footnotes referencing leftnotes referencing topnotes referencing rightnotes
2
10
1
5
I think it’s important for authors to do the work of structuring the idea space to help readers navigate it; and a pure mind map graph doesn’t. We don’t yet have good tools for intermediate degrees of structuring. Cc
2
12
Indeed… I’m pretty bearish on this problem space in its broadest framing. There’s been a ton of effort thrown at this over the last four decades with little return; I think we’re going to need some new powerful ideas to make progress.
I think there are constrained sub-problems that are more solvable. One that looks particularly tractable is strict subsetting, in which the text remains linear but some readers want to read a subset (e.g. without the math). We have decent interface solutions there.
1
12
The more significant problem with that very constrained framing or the somewhat less constrained multiple-threads framing is in authoring. Quality prose dances; arcs can’t readily be truncated or transposed. It appears to be very hard to compose well in these mediums.
2
6
Show replies
I read more than I write, thus I'm biased toward presentation, to giving the reader a "you are here" map. The table of contents flattens a tree traversal. For more complex graphs, I'd just throw in that graph itself, and let the reader keep track of what he knows.