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I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

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Re: I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

#41

Post by tim333 »

CatsoCatsoCatso wrote: post #31
ygra wrote: post #17

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…

Telescope Text is very interesting, thanks for the link.

Yeah, it would be an interesting format to produce a novel in. You could see the summarised story and expand the interesting bits.

Re: I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

#42

Post by dredmorbius »

Tree-style tabbed browsing makes tree-traversal style web browsing far more tractable.

Sadly, Chrome doesn't have a tree-style tabs mode, nor can it be provided by the existing Chrome extension format. There are a number of tree-style tab extensions for Firefox (e.g., "Tree Style Tab": http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en).

There are any of a number of changes to the browser model I'd very much prefer aimed at information management, as opposed to the web-applications centric focus of the past several years.

In an interesting departure, Kobo advertised among the features of its (Android-based) tablet a web browser which simplified pages to an easy-to-read view. Based on present pre-loaded apps bundles, it looks as if that was the Pocket browser, but I still find it interesting that this was pitched as a benefit to a largely nontechnical, literary audience. It certainly reflects my own growing dissatisfaction with present-generation browsers.

Re: I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

#43

Post by lewispollard »

I use the 'wikipedia quick hints' chrome extension and it works really well for me. It works kind of like the navigation popups already mentioned - but links inside the modal can also be hovered over, 'recursively'.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikipedia-quick-hi...

Re: I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

#44

Post by jasongrout »

The American Institute of Mathematics has been promoting "knowls", which is a very similar idea and implementation: http://www.aimath.org/knowlepedia/

Rob Beezer's free open-source linear algebra book uses these extensively to provide more details in proofs and in exposition. It's very nice. For example, click on the underlined blue text at http://linear.ups.edu/html/section-SSLE.html

Re: I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

#45

Post by 3rd3 »

neilk wrote: post #35
Svip wrote: post #4

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.

The OP's design for it is much nicer. 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.

Implementing it in HTML/CSS/JS certainly poses an interesting problem because, as far as I know, one cannot directly access individual, dynamically broken lines of text. One would probably have to wrap each word in a container and keep track of the absolute positions.

Re: I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

#46

Post by zodiac »

I thought this was a really interesting idea and tried implementing it. You can check out the demo here:

http://xuanji.appspot.com/static/wikipedia.html

Note that the "sinusoidal wave" link isn't working, as it redirects to "sine wave"...gotta work around that :(

If you want to read/modify the code send a pull request to github.com/zodiac/xuanji.appspot.com/, the commit which implemented this is https://github.com/zodiac/xuanji.appspot.com/commit/872b40dc...

Re: I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

#48

Post by assaflavie »

3rd3 wrote: post #45
neilk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP's design for it is much nicer. 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.

Implementing it in HTML/CSS/JS certainly poses an interesting problem because, as far as I know, one cannot directly access individual, dynamically broken lines of text. One would probably have to wrap each word in a container and keep track of the absolute positions.

Very true. I got a rough POC of this, implemented using the technique in this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/22816419/11208

(just with divs instead of images)

It's very brittle though. It relies on knowing the line-height, calculating the line in which the highlighted word sits, accounting for the existence of vertical scroll-bars... not trivial.

Re: I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

#49

Post by Adirael »

3rd3 wrote: post #45
neilk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP's design for it is much nicer. 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.

Implementing it in HTML/CSS/JS certainly poses an interesting problem because, as far as I know, one cannot directly access individual, dynamically broken lines of text. One would probably have to wrap each word in a container and keep track of the absolute positions.

You can use getSelection() to do that, but it doesn't work everywhere. [0] [1]

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7563169/detect-which-wor...

[1] http://jsfiddle.net/Vap7C/15/

Re: I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

#50

Post by [deleted] »

Adirael wrote: post #49
3rd3 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementing it in HTML/CSS/JS certainly poses an interesting problem because, as far as I know, one cannot directly access individual, dynamically broken lines of text. One would probably have to wrap each word in a container and keep track of the absolute positions.

You can use getSelection() to do that, but it doesn't work everywhere. [0] [1] [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7563169/detect-which-wor... [1] http://jsfiddle.net/Vap7C/15/

[deleted]
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