2 ms·

Unintuitive and not very useful tbh. Seems like something that would be good at first glance, but a really bad idea once you dig into it. ----- I would like t

Unintuitive and not very useful tbh. Seems like something that would be good at first glance, but a really bad idea once you dig into it. ----- I would like to see some suggestions on the semantics of different levels of content detail. Because different authors could organize their articles in different ways such that it would be hard to navigate the information since there's no standard for what to expect. Which leads to another issue which is that it doesn't really remove the hidden detail from the user's focus. There's no way to know which level of detail is correct for them. If you read and article and think "this doesn't make sense, there should be some more information" then you'd have to scroll through multiple levels (plus or minus one level) to make sure that it's the level of detail you're on and not the article that omitted that information. And moving in between levels isn't easy either. It's not just certain sections, individual paragraphs seem to change from level to level. Which means that if you read a tldr view and you want more information, there's no way to gracefully add the new detail. You essentially have an entirely new article. Perhaps the biggest issue is that I am not sure such a feature even if it was ironed out would be useful. I think readership detail is usually binary. Either someone wants a coarse overview, or they want the full story. I know that there are obviously exceptions like where there's a lot of fluff to a story and you wish they'd cut it out but that's typically the purpose of those articles. They're meant to be read that way. We already have things like table of contents and certain standards in writing that make navigating the details of an article pretty fast already without adding some kind of complicated ui into the mix. I am not even sure that an author would want to put in all this effort and write an article in such a way. Writing is usually very purposeful and thinking about how to write something that makes sense at multiple levels of detail seems like it would be really troublesome. As a side note, the background color option on their test example should not be a continuous range. The halfway value makes everything grey.

kaycebasques 8y ago
> I would like to see some suggestions on the semantics of different levels of content detail. My colleague had the same response. He phrased it like this: "I always end up reading the whole article anyways because I don't trust what the author considers to be high importance and low importance." > And moving in between levels isn't easy either. It's not just certain sections, individual paragraphs seem to change from level to level. I'm assuming that you mean Parametric Press's implementation. In my blog post (I'm the author) I instinctively marked up sections as high-priority or low-priority. But I hadn't thought about this until you pointed it out. Inevitably, some authors would markup a section as high-priority, but put low-priority paragraphs within the section. So paragraphs would disappear from the section, as you said. > I am not even sure that an author would want to put in all this effort and write an article in such a way. Yes. Speaking from the experience of creating this prototype, it sucked to author this. That's why I said that users would have to positively respond strongly to this feature in order to make it worthwhile. Otherwise writers simply won't have the motivation to do it.

kaycebasques 8y ago

> I would like to see some suggestions on the semantics of different levels of content detail. My colleague had the same response. He phrased it like this: "I always end up reading the whole article anyways because I don't trust what the author considers to be high importance and low importance." > And moving in between levels isn't easy either. It's not just certain sections, individual paragraphs seem to change from level to level. I'm assuming that you mean Parametric Press's implementation. In my blog post (I'm the author) I instinctively marked up sections as high-priority or low-priority. But I hadn't thought about this until you pointed it out. Inevitably, some authors would markup a section as high-priority, but put low-priority paragraphs within the section. So paragraphs would disappear from the section, as you said. > I am not even sure that an author would want to put in all this effort and write an article in such a way. Yes. Speaking from the experience of creating this prototype, it sucked to author this. That's why I said that users would have to positively respond strongly to this feature in order to make it worthwhile. Otherwise writers simply won't have the motivation to do it.