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Responsive Text

frankieroberto.com

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Re: Responsive Text

#41

Post by wisty »

Here's a much better idea for responsive text: put a bare bones summary at the top, then expand the points below. This is useful for people on mobiles.

It's also useful for people with disabilities - blind people apparently like summaries and links, because otherwise it's hard for them to scan.

It also helps people who just aren't great at reading (or reading English), which is a huge deal these days. Almost half the web is below average intelligence now, and over half the web doesn't speak English natively. And everyone is busy.

Re: Responsive Text

#42

Post by waqf »

djtriptych wrote: post #34

This only makes sense to me in a progressive loading situation. That is, you load the summaries first, then load additional detail later in the rendering timeline. Fine; I'd get that. But I don't like the idea of not getting the full story every time. Why not think a couple years out and assume everyone's connection is fast enough to handle text - LOTS of text - even over a mobile connection. It's text . Like one-or-…

The problem with wanting to get the full story every time is that you look something up on Wikipedia and you end up reading the entire site.

Re: Responsive Text

#43

Post by waqf »

lazerwalker wrote: post #38
georgebashi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I think this format could work well in certain situations where it can be done automatically, like for comments with karma. You could vary the threshold for hidden comments, so mobile users see less but overall higher quality comments (with a link to show hidden ones), and desktop users see all by default.

Are you talking about (a) completely hiding low-karma posts, or (b) "minimizing" the text of those low-karma posts in a way similar to how the example works? If it's (a), that's basically what sites like Slashdot and Reddit already do for desktop users. If it's (b), the obvious question is how you algorithmically filter text to only include the pertinent information (the given example is almost certainly hard-coded),…

Maybe you could put unpopular posts in shades of grey? Or smaller fonts?

Re: Responsive Text

#44

Post by mosfet9 »

I like this technique, and I think it would be appropriate to extend it other hierarchical types of data besides just text. For example, a product page might show a list of reviews, with each shown as x/5 stars, and zooming in on the reviews would show the review text. Same with product info - zoomed out = overview, zoomed in: more details appear. This would require zooming in on a specific section of a page though, not just making the entire page bigger. Imagine browsing an online store or search results by zooming in/out using a touch interface, rather than clicking on links to details/reviews/photos

Re: Responsive Text

#45

Post by tosh »

Interesting approach, ultimately though we'll want to optimize for physical device size and distance between user & device :)

I guess this will get easier once almost every display uses the ppi of the iPhone 4.

Re: Responsive Text

#46

Post by nitrogen »

Kudos. A similar idea I had but never implemented (no doubt I'm not the only one), that would show/hide text based on user knowledge rather than screen size:

  Mar. 21, 2010
  -------------
  
  Sometimes when writing a blog post, article, or other composition that will be
  read by more than one class of audience, one audience can become bored or upset
  by content that is needed to bring another audience up to speed.  For example, a
  blog written by a highly technical person both to educate other technical people
  and to keep less-technical family members in the loop may include lots of
  simplified definitions of technical terms that most technical people already
  know.  To prevent alienation of the technical group while still preserving the
  definitions and explanations for non-technical readers, definitions could be
  surrounded by a span or div of class "nontech_definition".  A simple script,
  client-side custom stylesheet, or alternate stylesheet could then allow
  technical readers to set those definitions to visibilty:hidden or even
  display:none, and continue on their way uninterrupted by repetitive and
  unnecessary (for them) clarifications.  To alert the technical readers of this
  possibility, a note or link could be provided by the first definition on each
  page (or last, or as a footnote or tooltip, etc.) explaining how to hide the
  definitions.
This idea occurred to me while reading an article about VCs and startups. The article made repeated reference to BI businesses, but I had to look up the relevant definition of BI (in this case, business intelligence).

P.S. I'm sure my variation of the idea was anticipated by the creators of CSS.

Re: Responsive Text

#47

Post by thomas11 »

ot wrote: post #9

I may have a problem with OCD, but I would hate the idea that some content is hidden to me just because I'm browsing with the wrong screen/window size. Hiding redundant elements, navigational bars, maybe images, etc... is fine, but I'm definitely not comfortable with the idea of hiding content based on context.

It should be something that's orthogonal to screen size. Maybe have a slider somewhere on the page that allows you to zoom in and out of the content.

Re: Responsive Text

#49

Post by monsterix »

Somehow, I feel that even responsive web-design is a half-ass solution to scaling a web-app from a mobile/hand-held to a LCD screen.

For example, right now I am watching your Responsive Text page on an 1920 x 1080 (49" LCD panel) and the text did not scale to a level to which it could. Besides it's not just about font-size or image scaling. It's about managing the size of each pixel too, so that things remain in proportion.

I know this is a hard problem, and there has been no acceptable/worthy answer to this question on SOF either: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8421533/how-to-obtain-ctr...

Re: Responsive Text

#50

Post by Gring »

My problem with those responsive web sites is that they only react to changes of the browser window width, but not the height.

For example, on this page, you can change the width so that we only see 3 short sentences. But if you change your browser height from 800x800 to 800x350, you still get the full, long text, but it's cut off in the middle, and there is a scroll bar. If the author's intent was to try hard to show those 3 short sentences without readers needing to scroll, then it fails here.

Responsive websites should be thinking "ok, I've got this amount of space here, let's fill it in the best way possible", not "ok let's make 3 designs based on browser width".

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