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.<p>[1] <a href="https://hyperscope.org" rel="nofollow">https://hyperscope.org</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/154/86/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/154/86/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://github.com/BradNeuberg/hyperscope" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/BradNeuberg/hyperscope</a><p>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. ;-)
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.<p>Edit: found it: Telescopic Text. The website is down right now but the web archive works: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220316001859/http://www.telescopictext.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20220316001859/http://www.telesc...</a><p>Discussed here 11 years ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2551120" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2551120</a>
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.<p>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.
Here's a cool guy who's entire homepage is one giant stretchtext!<p><a href="https://andrewcantino.com/" rel="nofollow">https://andrewcantino.com/</a><p>It starts with three short sentences, but expands into three full pages once you've stretched it all out.
The way this is described it reminds me of the <details> and <summary> tags in HTML, most often used for spoilers.<p>But I am not sure if I understood it correctly. This might be more for different level of comprehension (eli5?).
Reminds me of Nicky Case's "Nutshell" [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://ncase.me/nutshell-wip/" rel="nofollow">https://ncase.me/nutshell-wip/</a>
See also "zooming" UIs: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface</a><p>(A fun simple demo of zooming in JS <a href="https://josephernest.github.io/bigpicture.js/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://josephernest.github.io/bigpicture.js/index.html</a> )<p>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
<a href="https://billwadge.com/2022/02/24/stretchtext-or-bust-ted-nelsons-unrealized-vision/" rel="nofollow">https://billwadge.com/2022/02/24/stretchtext-or-bust-ted-nel...</a>
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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://xrafstar.monster/games/twine/sauna/" rel="nofollow">https://xrafstar.monster/games/twine/sauna/</a>
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.
Reminds me of Orteil's Nested (same author as Cookie Clicker). A gamedev adaptation of this idea would be interesting.<p><a href="http://orteil.dashnet.org/nested" rel="nofollow">http://orteil.dashnet.org/nested</a>
In practice it seems like we do this all the time.<p>“TLDR” summaries seem like this.<p>Those knowledge graph snippets on Google seems like this.<p>The first paragraph of many news stories seem like this.<p>The first answer on a Quora page before you have to login seems like this.<p>Other than like an actual specific technical “feature” implementation it seems like this is everywhere in my life.