6 ms·
Telescopictext
- davecap1 15y agoTo make your own, go here: http://www.telescopictext.org http://www.telescopictext.org
- kenjackson 15y agoDoesn't work with IE. I wonder what feature of IE9 isn't supported? Oh well. Maybe will have to write my own for IE.
- jnhnum1 15y agoThe 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 15y agoThank you for the TLDR. I wondered whether the text would just keep expanding forever... In some ways I am sad that it did not.
- akent 15y agoIsn't the TL;DR "I made tea" ?
- solipsist 15y agoI think he meant, TL;DE (To Long; Didn't Expand) ;)
- hannesw 15y agoThe 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.
- jnhnum1 15y agoBuffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...)
- bostonpete 15y agoIt 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..."
- LokiSnake 15y agoPerhaps using some kind of Markov chain process? It could be amusing, but would be more interesting with some kind of understanding of parts of speech.
- drhodes 15y agoThis 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.
- veb 15y agoI never thought expanding something would be so fun. Brings a new meaning to story telling if you do it right. :)
- endgame 15y agoIt was much more interesting than foldr.com.
- abecedarius 15y agohttp://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/matter/index.html 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.
- pufuwozu 15y agoWow, the http://www.telescopictext.org/ 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 http://www.telescopictext.org/text/AYeELHzYgVV8b
- Smerity 15y agoIt 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)
- aamar 15y agoMy colleague (with some help from me) created an interactive version of the 1932 French poem "Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique" by Roussel, one of the early experiments in this vein: http://withhiddennoise.net/roussel/ http://withhiddennoise.net/roussel/
- tuhin 15y agoHere Simon Collison has tried a decent approach for footnotes: http://colly.com/comments/redesigning_the_undesigned/ http://colly.com/comments/redesigning_the_undesigned/ Search for "A few Easter eggs"
- 6ren 15y agoArguably, hyperlinks are footnotes.
- mr_pppoe 15y agoIt looks a good replacement for certain hyperlinks, if we can save/load the hidden text from the database.
- honza 15y agoWhat the fuck is the point of this?!
- edsrzf 15y agoIt 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.
- basseq 15y agoI discovered Joe Davis and TT a couple years (even going so far as to make my own editing tool which, I like to think, influenced Joe's own implementation). I was thinking about the news article ideas the other day, actually. (E.g., a 24in60.com snippet that expends to a full article.) I think it would be really cool, but it takes a lot of work to make something seamlessly go from being a snippet of information to a full-fledged investigatory article. You'd basically have to write a series of increasingly more detailed articles using the same story flow. This might be something text analytics and computer-generated content could be able to do; if not today, then someday.
- bkudria 15y agoOr 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.
- whimsy 15y agoThat's genius. I wish there was an organization in which they wrote most of their articles this way. Perhaps they could even send these articles to other organizations for some kind of reprinting fee.
- shashashasha 15y agoNice, it's like having a slider to go from Raymond Carver to David Foster Wallace.
- zachrose 15y agoNicholson 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.
- dennisgorelik 15y agoThe text does not collapse back...
- nolanw 15y agoIs your refresh button broken?
- dennisgorelik 15y agoThat collapses all the way back. Where's partial collapse?
- watkdab 15y agoHold down ALT and click a section (found this in: http://www.telescopictext.org/resources/reading-tips http://www.telescopictext.org/resources/reading-tips )
- gallerytungsten 15y agoIt would be nice if there was an "expand all" option, rather than forcing excess clicking to get to the end of the line.
- AlecSchueler 15y agoWhy the upper restriction in "Password must be between 6 to 20 characters" on telescopictext.org?
- Sudarshan 15y agoI 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.
- Wilduck 15y agoIf you want to un-expand the text, hold the alt key. Very cool.
- hasenj 15y agoThis 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.
- tuhin 15y agoYawning, 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.
- ramdac 15y agoThis is how cliff's notes should work.
- ryanga 15y agoA reverse tl;dr. I've got an urge to try formatting my resume like this.
- InfinityX0 15y agoI 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 15y agoAs 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.
- BasDirks 15y agoBased 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 15y agoAs someone in NLP I think I just came up with an idea about how it would be useful, but I won't say :D
- tobylane 15y agoThis 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?
- epo 15y agoI 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).
- lewispb 15y agoTop tip: never put the milk in first! :-)
- shimonamit 15y agoFor a minute there I thought I'd be able to paste in some text and automagically get a TL;DR. Pretty neat nonetheless.
- joelthelion 15y agoThis 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.
- marknutter 15y agoI wish 99% of all articles I read worked this way.
- lmarinho 15y agoNow someone should make a tool that expands from specification to actual code like this. How would that work?
- ctdonath 15y agoThis 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 15y agoDoesn't work on iOS Safari. Nuts; that's my primary personal content creation platform now.
- perivamsi 15y agohttp://www.telescopictext.org/text/fCvNOyBqKSJAh 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.
- alexyim 15y agoType in console to cheat: $('._b').click()