StretchText | Hacker News Reader

StretchText

en.wikipedia.org

111 pointsdbrereton38 comments

Marginally related: HyperScope by bootstrap.org (Doug Engelbart Institute). This is somewhat similar by providing hierarchical views into complex documents and referencing sections by ID, but is more realistic by doing this by a linear drilldown only.

[1] https://hyperscope.org

[2] https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/154/86/

[3] https://github.com/BradNeuberg/hyperscope

Note regarding realism: In my naivety, I once expected option-based content organization and composition, much like in StretchText, to become an inevitable feature of multi-platform presentation, when mobile clients arrived. Surely, there was no way to present content in a manner that would suit needs both for mobile presentation and traditional desktop presentations at once (regarding length, level of detail and feature richness), posing a serious economic challenge for any content production. Well, then we got mobile first. ;-)

I was going to link to this; top form fellow Engelbartian!

Have they fixed the Firefox 2.0/XSLT dependency in Hyperscope yet?

I'm not related to this in any way – so I can't speak for them. That said, the dependency is still mentioned in the Readme.

Provided that there are dependencies like Dojo and that that this was written in a time, when everything claiming seriousness was expected to look Java-ish, I'd guess, it may need a complete rewrite to fit the modern ecosystem. (Disclaimer: I didn't have a closer look at the code.)

This reminds me of something I've seen online where a short piece of writing is initially shown in an extremely abridged form, like "I made tea". Many of the words are clickable and are recursively expandable, repeated replacing individual words with phrases or inserting dependent clauses for more color, until you end up with a whole paragraph of a short of prose poetry.

Edit: found it: Telescopic Text. The website is down right now but the web archive works: https://web.archive.org/web/20220316001859/http://www.telesc...

Discussed here 11 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2551120

The website is not down. It's moved https://www.telescopictext.org/texts/

I think that AI will deliver a form of StrechText for every document, plus video and audio. It will condense the media down to any length you want.

A funny example of this is many people pad their YouTube videos out to 10+ minutes because they do better that way. With AI you'll be able to request a short version of that video. At which point the AI will squeeze out the duplication the human purposely added in to satisfy the algorithm.

Well, the content of the video may be condensed, but they'll absolutely be putting the same number of ad-rolls in the video.

Doesn't Google already try this with showing relevant snippets of YouTube videos in search? It never seemed to work _excellent_, still have to manually scrub, get the context, etc

Let’s hope so! And also for similar treatment for some of the 19th century literary classics whose authors were paid by the word.

See comments by the "autotldr" reddit bot[1] - IMO it is very good at generating summaries of articles.

Also see this post[2] for some info on how it works.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/user/autotldr

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotl...

Smmry is also good. https://smmry.com

Yep that's what the reddit bot uses aha.

Here's a cool guy who's entire homepage is one giant stretchtext!

https://andrewcantino.com/

It starts with three short sentences, but expands into three full pages once you've stretched it all out.

This is brilliant.

The way this is described it reminds me of the <details> and <summary> tags in HTML, most often used for spoilers.

But I am not sure if I understood it correctly. This might be more for different level of comprehension (eli5?).

I could be wrong, but I'm interpreting it as a sort of analogous system to Word's autosummary feature. That is, You put in a complete text, and then have periodically briefer summaries of it (perhaps in sections, such as paragraphs?). You start with the summarised version, but then as the reader stretches out the text, it dynamically provides more detail in the areas that are stretched out.

e: For those like me who just went looking, apparently autosummary was removed in Word 2010, which given I had 2007 til about 2 years ago and thus didn't realise it was missing :)

Here's a description of it: https://www.officetooltips.com/word_2007/tips/getting_to_the...

I'm as baffled as you. I did find this that may or may not help. It only very barely helped me. https://ia904500.us.archive.org/32/items/STRETCHTEXT/STRETCH...

It sounds like you have to write multiple versions of the text, and then if the user grabs one of the markers and "stretches" it, the next-most detailed version of the text will get loaded.

But I could be very wrong. It is extraordinarily difficult to find something concrete as a demo. I gave up on link after link of the same description with no actual demo anywhere.

> It is extraordinarily difficult to find something concrete as a demo.

I think that's because it would be extraordinarily difficult to write something good using StretchText. It would amazing if it could be done, but the amount of effort needed to do so is probably the main reason why no-one does.

With the advances in machine learning, I wonder if you couldn't automate it. Write the most detailed level and have some ML model generate the ever more high-level summaries.

Yes, exactly. This is also applicable to building good prompts for language models from larger document sets.

Here is an example of using Github page summaries to seed knowledge in discussing various topics with GPT-3: https://github.com/daveshap/LongtermChatExternalSources

My brother-in-law built a very small demo to advertise an implementation of StretchText he made years ago:

https://natematias.com/stretchtext/

I don't recall whether he ever built anything larger with that.

Reminds me of Nicky Case's "Nutshell" [0]

[0] https://ncase.me/nutshell-wip/

See also "zooming" UIs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

(A fun simple demo of zooming in JS https://josephernest.github.io/bigpicture.js/index.html )

And hyperbolic geometry for layout?

Christopher Alexander (of “A Pattern Language” fame) wrote at least one of his other books, “The Timeless Way of Building” in this way with bold headings being sufficient to grasp all the key points of the book, and non-bolded paragraphs under the headings to provide the full detail as needed to suit the reader.

You might want to check out my (Bill Wadge's) blog post on stretch text https://billwadge.com/2022/02/24/stretchtext-or-bust-ted-nel...

Interesting. Something similar to this was my diploma thesis, although I wasn't able to find this as prior art. My intentions were mostly to have text adjust itself beforehand to the reader's preferences and pre-existing knowledge. Then certain parts would either be abridged, or fleshed out in more detail; explanations added for concepts not yet known, or further sections pertaining to additional interests.

I thought this to be perhaps a good way of writing things to teach with, in that the result would be applicable to a wider variety of readers. However, writing would likely be a problem, since (a) much more content has to be written, and (b) everything should make sense in all possible combinations of snippets, which can be hard to guarantee.

I've seen this used for humorous effect in Twine style games, like this one:

https://xrafstar.monster/games/twine/sauna/

Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I've seen this happen inadvertently due to "responsive design" - mobile views of the same page will display less detail. It's kind of a bad practice, but I see in the wild all the time.

Now if we only had this for diagrams.

Reminds me of Orteil's Nested (same author as Cookie Clicker). A gamedev adaptation of this idea would be interesting.

http://orteil.dashnet.org/nested

Stretchable graphical mythology: https://essenmitsosse.de/pixel

I'd sure go for a standardized inline HTML tag that expands in UI like <details>. Semantics like a footnote, perhaps.

The equivalent of seam carving for images?

I’m not sure this is a good analogy, seam carving removes the most common parts of an image and the details remain (and here the reader at first sees a generic overview and the details are hidden).

In practice it seems like we do this all the time.

“TLDR” summaries seem like this.

Those knowledge graph snippets on Google seems like this.

The first paragraph of many news stories seem like this.

The first answer on a Quora page before you have to login seems like this.

Other than like an actual specific technical “feature” implementation it seems like this is everywhere in my life.

Another significant example is Wikipedia. Compare the English vs. Simple English version of "engine":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine

Abstracts and book summaries are another large category of something similar being done "in the wild".

Whilst the outcome of the simple English wikipedia may agree with this, the intention is different; I believe the articles in simple English could (and should) be as long as the regular articles, but written with a reduced and simpler vocabulary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com