Last week at WisCon, Kathryn Cramer showed some of us her thinking about writing for weblogs and hypertext. She summed it up with her comment about being tired of writing on a “roll of paper towels.”
Her example was her long post on the use of private military contractors in Iraq.
What she wants is a ‘kinetic sculpture,’ a format that’s more of a self contained hypertext. Her Iraq post was full of references and quotes which she wanted to be able to navigate around and through.
At the discussion, my first reaction was to think of the fragments of her post as bunch of Atom content bits which you’d orchestrate with an XSLT transform.
Then I read some of the JavaScript hackery Simon Willison wrote while I was in Madison: a standard way to add onload handlers for things on the page, and a way to add ids to the page.
So an approach:
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As you write, you put sections of a post in DIVs with unique ids.
Some variant of Simon’s tool would be handy in the editing stage.
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You link between the divs.
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When displaying the page, your
onloadhandler sets the proper initial state for showing and hiding the divs, and bindsonclickevents that show and and hide. -
The reader then bounces around the long post as if it were a little Hypercard or WML stack.
