Text has historically been a static object due to the constraints of the medium it has been used in (paper, hard to make paper dynamic). There are some innovation with pull tab cards and zines and fun page-navigation directions for choose your own text adventures, but they are very hard to conceptualize and actualize given the tools.
With software, text becomes a lot more inherently dynamic. HTML is literally a markup language that inherently creates a free-form space for play with display and interaction of text content on the web, but we’ve mostly been skeumorphic in our application of it. Digital essays still look like paper essays in a lot of ways.
Where are the innovations in taking this new property of dynamism to the extreme?
- telescopic text lets you collapse/expand text-inline
- this is already semi-natively supported in HTML via the
<details>and<summary>
- this is already semi-natively supported in HTML via the
What other ways could we extend this?
- pluriversal text: instead of manual one-way suggestions, what if you could incorporate a plurality of texts in a single collection.
- talked about this concept with Niko Klein
- animated text
- linus had an example of this in his short story
and how can you make these sorts of interactions and dynamisms easy to use and accessible to all?
- not just technologists should be able to leverage this and experiment with it
- it should be easy to plug and play and integrate into how people already write text and poems rather than requiring custom code or a new workflow for each thing.