Dave Winer’s been experimenting with a feature he calls “Sub-text”, which lets you get more depth from a story while still being able to skim-read it. The idea is simple: You can embed a piece of sub-text underneath a paragraph, which you can expand or contract at will.
The basic idea is that you should be able to skim the post without reading the sub-text, but that the sub-text provides additional depth to the paragraph it’s attached to. It’s one of Dave’s responses to the fact that people tend to skim-read online rather than actually reading things fully.
I think it’s actually a pretty neat idea, and one that I’d like to incorporate into this blog. At the moment, there’s some rough edges – most notably, RSS doesn’t support it which means you have to read the site in order to get the “full” text. But it still looks promising as a method for adding depth without linking off to other pages.
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