Saturday, December 17, 2016

Hierarchical-reveal hypertext design




The new style of hypertext I'm exploring in the post "Button test" below is a partial blogger simulation of my planned Fweet-style Ulysses database I've been calling Uleet.

Since Blogger recently changed their rules for images to require https, I'm looking at going thru all 800 pages to find image substitutes.

I thought I might take the opportunity to try to:

1) streamline the page design

2) tag the note-types in anticipation of Uleet

I hadn't expected to be able to implement conceal-reveal buttons in Blogger, but a lot of that kind of stuff seems do-able if you know how.

The current design goals:

1) when you first load a page, you see almost-uninterrupted Joycean text. Linebreaks are freeform for readability, with subtle annotations-buttons at convenient points. (Delaney's embedded podcasts are also visible at this level.)

[at the moment, only the annotations-buttons after "stairhead" and "crossed" are implemented]

2) clicking an annotations-button opens up a summary-view of all annotations for that passage, one short line for each note, starting with a colored oval with emoji (itself the next level of reveal-button) followed by the note-type in CAPS and a short summary-title. (illustrations are visible at this level) The background colors of the ovals will probably categorise the note-types in some simpler way.

3) Clicking an oval button opens that note. These can include a lot more redundant links since their display is optional.

Serious readers will be expected to open every note, skimmers can ignore all but their primary interest.


Switching formats will be a huge task.  The html is ugly and verbose, and the note-types are messy and arbitrary.


The emoji symbols may or may not prove useful-- at least they're decorative.




No comments:

Post a Comment