Ooohhh this one's gonna be a big hit, I can feel it.
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Next level is sidenotes in the right referencing footnotes referencing leftnotes referencing topnotes referencing rightnotes
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
One inkling: there’s a genre of book where a blogger bundles up many articles with a bit of structure and slaps a cover on it. That approach is probably more amenable to these mediums, since the “units” are designed to stand on their own.
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<snark> There's a genre of Book where chapter-sized pieces (as forced by technology) written mostly by different bloggers are bundled together with a little structure and declared infallible.
</snark>
Possibly there’s a chicken-and-egg problem. We’ve developed extensive methods, partly tacit, for structuring linear text—developed collectively over centuries, and individually through reading examples and gradually getting better at producing them.
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Yeah, I think that’s right. It may be possible to develop good patterns for hypertext writing. I don’t think many serious authors have attempted serious work in hypertext: it’s mostly technologists, more interested in the tools than in writing itself.
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