Discussion
I'm envisioning a text format using nesting. Is this a thing?
Say it was used for digital teaching materials. A file might contain an entire textbook worth of text. But rather than linear, or hyperlinked, it would be navigated by starting with a 1 page summary, by human educators. Clicking on any sentence in that page would opens up a paragraph of deeper explanation.
Then another layer again, until opening up all sentences delivers a book-length text.
(1/2)
If concertina books (so to speak) took off, as a way of presenting human-curated nonfiction text, the summaries could be written by the original authors, while preparing their book for publication.
It ought to be possible to deliver this using HTML5, but I'd wondering what other options might be. Could LaTex be used for this, for example? Could it do a smooth job of it, or would it be a stretch?
(2/2)
One of the responses to the 'textbook' as a concertina format' posts linked to some #MOLE-generated pages that folded in some critique of the concertina concept. Here's my responses;
1) It's a lot more work for authors to write all the extra summary text
A good textbook follows the same logic, just in a linear form. It starts with simple statements, then goes into more detail about them. So the summary statements can be taken verbatim from the text, or maybe (sub-)headings.
(1/?)
2) Students will get lost in the folds.
If the format allows more than one sentence at the same level of nesting to be expanded at once, then yes. The document would become more confusing to navigate as more first-level sentences are expanded, and sentences within those. My concept is that only one first-level sentence can be expanded at a time, and so on down into the nested layers.
(2/?)
The idea is a student will read the landing page first. Like reading the introduction to a long text, except the sentences on the landing page of a concertina textbook could be more technical.
Then they'll read through again. Skimming over sentences that already make total sense now they have the overview, and only expanding a sentence if they're not confident they fully understand it. Once they dig deep enough to understand that sentence, they click a close button, and move on.
(3/?)
@strypey somewhat related: I recently tried to read Nabokov's Pale Fire, a hypertext book that predates hypertext and tells two stories, one in the text and one in the footnotes. I read it on an ereader because that seemed to make sense, but the software was so slow and the experience so bad I had to abandon it.
@sixohsix
> a hypertext book that predates hypertext and tells two stories, one in the text and one in the footnotes
Intriguing. Something to look out for a print copy of.
@TiddlyWiki looks intriguing, thanks @gvlx
@Netraven
> something like this?
Pretty much. I had a feeling I wasn't inventing something new ; ) Any idea who created this or if source code is available?
@strypey just download the index.htm and inspect it. the sites are standalone. They work locally as well as hosted.
for reference, I went to arena.ai and prompted two random AI to generate a webpage based off your initial question, verbatim.
@Netraven
> or perhaps this?
Oof. Sorry website, I didn't mean to have a well-trodden but impractical idea ; )
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
