

Telescopictext - fun2have
http://www.telescopictext.com/

======
pufuwozu
Wow, the <http://www.telescopictext.org/> website is a very slick tool to
create your own.

I created an example one here (made a few typos that I couldn't figure out how
to fix):

<http://www.telescopictext.org/text/AYeELHzYgVV8b>

~~~
Smerity
It has the feel of interactive embedded footnotes with positive reinforcement
for opening them -- each time I clicked it revealed a few more features about
you. Positive reinforcement is an important factor as you feel like you're
discovering information hidden at a deeper level. Even if dozens, or even
hundreds, have discovered that "secret" before it still feels like you've
achieved something. The alt-text on XKCD is a perfect example of this.

Footnotes tend to convey additional information omitted due to necessity or
lack of interest by the mainstream readers. I don't see them online a great
deal, primarily as the web isn't composed of traditional pages so they don't
translate well...

Has anyone else seen an interesting or novel way of doing footnotes on the
internet?

(unrelated, but if anyone wants a fascinating example of footnotes in meta-
fiction, the novel Oracle Night by Paul Auster has entire subplots and even
another "book" hidden in the footnotes)

~~~
camtarn
Slate magazine uses a nice way of presenting footnotes, especially in the
series of long-form articles it published in the last few months. They use a
small grey circle with a + sign in it; when you hover over the circle, a popup
appears with the footnote. Some of the long-form articles have entire
paragraphs in each footnote, which seem like they've been removed to make the
article flow better but preserved for the interested reader who would like
more detail. Others are simply corrections or clarifications added after the
fact. I'd love it if more sites picked up this convention.

Another site which has a particularly unique way of writing footnotes is E2 (
<http://everything2.com> ). Like Wikipedia, editors ('noders') are encouraged
to link articles ('nodes') together by hyperlinking words throughout the text.
Unlike Wikipedia, noders can post anything: essays, fiction, poetry.

Some use the hyperlinks as commentary on the main text - if you hover over
them, the title of the linked node can be very different from the text of the
actual link, possibly changing the meaning of a sentence (for example, "I tell
her that I'm [okay]", with [okay] linking to the node 'I am not okay'.)

Occasionally, noders link entire phrases or sentences which seem interesting,
even if there's no actual node with that name. There is the concept of
"filling nodeshells": writing new and interesting content to fill a node which
was created by someone linking a phrase from another node.

Each node also holds a grid of 'softlinks': nodes which people visited from
that node. Mostly this is composed of links from the text in that node, but it
can also be used for readers' commentary via the readers deliberately visiting
appropriately-titled nodes.

More info: <http://everything2.com/title/The+perfect+node>

------
InfinityX0
I see some deeper meaning in this - in that it is an explicit way to show how
communication can be parsed down so simply. Many writers/communicators want to
extrapolate every thought into word tombs - when they can very often be
summated in something as small as "I made tea." Beautiful execution, here, on
getting me (and hopefully others) to think about writing/communicating more
simplistically - and then actually doing it.

Otherwise stated, "This makes me want to communicate more simply."

~~~
CWuestefeld
As I was playing with it, I was thinking about how it illustrates the way
magnifying different aspects can give a different feeling to one's writing.
Like: can I get better emphasis by keeping a particular facet short and
direct, or does it pay to expand on it?

So I think it's not just about keeping it simple, but seeing where simple
might be better, or where depth might be better.

------
jnhnum1
The fully expanded text is:

Yawning, and smearing my eyes with my fingers, I walked bleary eyed into the
kitchen and filled the kettle with fresh water from the tap, checking with my
hands to make sure it was cold enough (The best tea comes from the coldest
water). I glanced outside for a minute at the city mist. I could almost taste
the grey. I plugged the kettle in and switched it on. As the kettle began to
hiss, I looked for biscuits. Anything above loose crumbs would do. Thankfully
I found some fusty digestives. For some reason, biscuits are always nicer when
they've gone a bit dry and stale. I took the milk out of the fridge and poured
some into a cup that I'd left out from having used earlier. The kettle began
grumbling fiercely so I took it from the cord, threw a teabag into my cup and
poured boiling water onto it. I watched brown swirls rise up through the muted
white of milky water. A few minutes passed. I removed and squeezed the teabag,
then flicked it into the bin. I picked up my mug and left the kitchen with a
nice, hot cup of strong tea.

~~~
arctangent
Thank you for the TLDR. I wondered whether the text would just keep expanding
forever... In some ways I am sad that it did not.

~~~
hannesw
The only way to make it expand forever would be to support recursion. Would be
interesting what texts you could come up with that. Kind of a textual
Mandelbrot set.

~~~
bostonpete
It was a dark and stormy night. The captain and his men were huddled around a
campfire. The captain turned to Jake and said "Jake, tell us a story.", so
Jake began his story: "It was a dark and stormy night. The captain and his men
were huddled around the campfire..."

------
edsrzf
It might be nice to read news articles this way. Start with the headline and
expand the parts that interest you the most. I can imagine it being difficult
to write that way, though.

~~~
bkudria
Or maybe just write the article, and present the most-important bits first,
starting with the headline. Then, the first paragraph or so would cover the
important points, and as you kept reading, it'd get less and less important.

~~~
qntm
That's exactly how all news stories are written. Unless you were making a
joke.

~~~
whimsy
Yes, that's the point.

Sadly, it's pretty trivial to disprove this by counterexample.

------
drhodes
This would be a great way to supplement dense text for comprehension purposes
and for learning new vocabulary. Learning moments are different for different
people, this makes it one-size-fits-all.

~~~
StavrosK
Except, people with OCPD would click everything through, just to see if they
missed anything, and really not make much headway into reading at all.

~~~
username3
For people with OCPD, OCPD is obsessive–compulsive personality disorder.

------
abecedarius
<http://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/matter/index.html>

a choose-your-own-adventure kind of like this, released a week or two ago by
Andrew Plotkin.

------
shashashasha
Nice, it's like having a slider to go from Raymond Carver to David Foster
Wallace.

~~~
zachrose
Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine is a terrific novel about a guy who leaves his
desk to ride down an escalator to buy shoelaces and a cookie.

------
davecap1
To make your own, go here: <http://www.telescopictext.org>

~~~
kenjackson
Doesn't work with IE. I wonder what feature of IE9 isn't supported? Oh well.
Maybe will have to write my own for IE.

------
ctdonath
This is great. All too often I've posted some rant, knowing it must be very
concise to get the point across to soundbite readers, yet wanting to provide
details to address obvious criticisms, yet having to somehow find a balance
between minimal meme transfer vs. encyclopedic thoroughness overwhelming the
basic meme. Hope this can be turned into a blogging/commenting tool.

~~~
ctdonath
There's got to be an easy HTML template for doing this without linking to an
external website.

~~~
LokiSnake
I can see this in terms of offering a Javascript for embedding in web pages.

------
BasDirks
Based on one of the comments below I couldn't help but wonder: Would trying to
program an "ever-expanding" text like this yield any new ideas in NLP?

~~~
mangala
As someone in NLP I think I just came up with an idea about how it would be
useful, but I won't say :D

------
veb
I never thought expanding something would be so fun. Brings a new meaning to
story telling if you do it right. :)

~~~
endgame
It was much more interesting than foldr.com.

------
Sudarshan
I hope some one writes a javascript library that takes a suitable formatted
text and has an expandTo(length) function so that the same info can fit into
various screen sizes without having a scrollbar.

------
ryanga
A reverse tl;dr. I've got an urge to try formatting my resume like this.

------
gallerytungsten
It would be nice if there was an "expand all" option, rather than forcing
excess clicking to get to the end of the line.

------
mr_pppoe
It looks a good replacement for certain hyperlinks, if we can save/load the
hidden text from the database.

------
AlecSchueler
Why the upper restriction in "Password must be between 6 to 20 characters" on
telescopictext.org?

------
Wilduck
If you want to un-expand the text, hold the alt key. Very cool.

------
epo
I saw something like this described many years ago (possibly by Ted Nelson,
who coined the term 'hypertext'). The concept was like a volume control for
text where cranking the volume control varied the amount of detail from one
line summary through to a multi page article.

I've always really liked the idea but writing coherent content could be
fiendishly difficult (the simple approach is just to provide a number of
versions and cycle through them).

------
marknutter
I wish 99% of all articles I read worked this way.

------
perivamsi
<http://www.telescopictext.org/text/fCvNOyBqKSJAh>

My "telescopic" thoughts on making this an interview question. When completely
expanded, it does not have a grammatical flow in some parts because I couldn't
edit text once created and I did not want to start from scratch.

------
joelthelion
This could be a very nice way of formatting a long description, such as the
description of your software or startup.

Think about it: instead of greeting your visitor with a wall of text, you
could have something like "XYZ is going to boost your productivity". The user
would only need to expand that's interesting to him.

------
tuhin
Yawning, and smearing my eyes with my fingers, I walked bleary eyed into the
kitchen and filled the kettle with fresh water from the tap, checking with my
hands to make sure it was cold enough (The best tea comes from the coldest
water). I glanced outside for a minute at the city mist. I could almost taste
the grey. I plugged the kettle in and switched it on. As the kettle began to
hiss, I looked for biscuits. Anything above loose crumbs would do. Thankfully
I found some fusty digestives. For some reason, biscuits are always nicer when
they've gone a bit dry and stale. I took the milk out of the fridge and poured
some into a cup that I'd left out from having used earlier. The kettle began
grumbling fiercely so I took it from the cord, threw a teabag into my cup and
poured boiling water onto it. I watched brown swirls rise up through the muted
white of milky water. A few minutes passed. I removed and squeezed the teabag,
then flicked it into the bin. I picked up my mug and left the kitchen with a
nice, hot cup of strong tea.

------
tobylane
This is the difference between my speech and my typing, my presentations and
my speaker notes, and so on. Anyone know how to learn to do this as you go
along, not preparing?

------
shimonamit
For a minute there I thought I'd be able to paste in some text and
automagically get a TL;DR. Pretty neat nonetheless.

------
lmarinho
Now someone should make a tool that expands from specification to actual code
like this. How would that work?

------
ramdac
This is how cliff's notes should work.

------
ctdonath
Doesn't work on iOS Safari.

Nuts; that's my primary personal content creation platform now.

------
alexyim
Type in console to cheat:

    
    
      $('._b').click()

------
lewispb
Top tip: never put the milk in first! :-)

------
dennisgorelik
The text does not collapse back...

~~~
nolanw
Is your refresh button broken?

~~~
dennisgorelik
That collapses all the way back. Where's partial collapse?

~~~
watkdab
Hold down ALT and click a section (found this in:
<http://www.telescopictext.org/resources/reading-tips> )

------
honza
What the fuck is the point of this?!

~~~
sadlyNess
Its 'fun 2 have'. :)

------
hasenj
This is why I hate reading novels. And the fact they forced me to read several
of them in high school when my English was rather poor.

