31–40 of 68 posts
Incidentally, this was what my diploma thesis was about. The basic idea was to have a single »text« that contains lots of possible branching or expansion points, depending on certain criteria. Depending on those criteria you'd get a expanded or contracted text to read that would be tailored to what you already know or are interested about. Altering the text in small parts (like [−1½] mentioned in another comment – I…
I prefer popups (floating elements) instead of altering the flow of the document. The continuous re-flow of the document is distracting.
Didn't Ted Nelson suggest this sort of in-situ display for transclusion in Xanadu?
I also made a (by no means complete) POC more simmiliar to your animation which you're welcome to fork and improve: http://en.wikimore.tomodo.me/wiki/Main_Page
In general, whenever you want to improve a website - Tomodo is the place to go (http://tomodo.com/)
This already exists on Wikipedia. Under preferences, select the Gadgets tab and enable "Navigation popups". When hovering over a link in a Wikipedia article, a small popup will appear, in addition to some metadata about the link, the first paragraph of the article will appear, including links that may appear in that paragraph, which can also be hovered to make another popup appear.
Navigation popups have been around since 2005, and while in some ways better than the OP's design (pictures!) this is useful enough to test it as default behavior.
Hover doesn't work on mobile, so perhaps they should appear if you click and hold for a few seconds.
About popups/tooltips/hovercards: I considered this approach, but decided to go with this sort of "inline" expansion for the following reasons: 1. A popup obscures the original text. This interferes with context, albeit admittedly to a much lesser degree than full-blown navigation, but still. 2. Multi-level popup hierarchies just don't look good, in my opinion. 3. You must dismiss a popup to continue, whereas with in…
tldr.io chrome extension does something like this