This was inspired by WikiWikiWeb (the first Wiki website), as well as Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. Narrow columns create what I term the newspaper effect: you jump to the next line more often, thus there's a smooth flow between horizontal and vertical eye movement and you can read text quicker. This is because every time you focus on a point, you can scan about six words positioned next to each other, and you're already scanning the next line up ahead as well, thus the text is parsed in a smooth flow. On the contrary, with too wide lines, you need to reorient each time your eyes move. Narrow columns provide a much more pleasant reading experience.
Imagine that the entire WWW worked like this, each column representing a page, and still interlinked. Each link may resolve to a different server but it opens in a new column instead of a new tab. You're no longer overwhelmed by each website providing its own flashy design or by having 1000 tabs open simultaneously. You simply scroll horizontally among your open pages. That's part of the idea behind Xanadu.
However, that's not what this is. This is static content scraped from Wikipedia and my goal is to demonstrate what such a web would look like. I applied it to one subject, namely religion. This is 1000 Wikipedia leads on the subject of religion presented in an interlinked manner, so you can quickly get a general overview of this subject. Why religion? Because it interests me.
Another inspiration for this is TiddlyWiki, which stresses non-lineairity by promoting short articles that are highly interlinked instead of long articles that each have their own TOC. That's why I scraped only the leads.
This is just a first prototype. It's missing a horizontal scrollbar. The website's AI-generated by the way and not everything works but I'm mostly amazed by how well it parses my prompt as well as succeeds in building such a website accurately. Also missing is paragraphing for many articles. I wanted to redo the scraping but it got throttled. And it just contains a list of related articles at the bottom instead of maintaining the inline links. These may be added in a future version. To make the text easier to read, I had it tuck away any parenthetical text in footnotes. This makes a huge difference. Wikipedia leads are really overburdened with parenthetical text.
Once again, it isn't really about the content shared here although it is a fun way to learn. It'd be cool if more of these can be created on different subjects. I might just.
Oh cool, I didn't even realize the scrollbar worked at all. This is an AI-generated website. Knowing that it's there will help me fix it in the next version. Check out my top-level comment, I just finished writing it up. Thanks for your feedback.
I wonder if Larry Sanger might be interested in this format. His idea is to join all the wikis of the world together somehow so you can contrast different perspectives.
Sad InfoGalactic is gone. Besides getting my own work on it, I'd love to scrape the history of it into a frozen archive or rebirthed project that's more useful than the WayBack. But I can't even update my own wiki's tools, much less keep it up to date or do all the projects I'd like.
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This was inspired by WikiWikiWeb (the first Wiki website), as well as Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. Narrow columns create what I term the newspaper effect: you jump to the next line more often, thus there's a smooth flow between horizontal and vertical eye movement and you can read text quicker. This is because every time you focus on a point, you can scan about six words positioned next to each other, and you're already scanning the next line up ahead as well, thus the text is parsed in a smooth flow. On the contrary, with too wide lines, you need to reorient each time your eyes move. Narrow columns provide a much more pleasant reading experience.
Imagine that the entire WWW worked like this, each column representing a page, and still interlinked. Each link may resolve to a different server but it opens in a new column instead of a new tab. You're no longer overwhelmed by each website providing its own flashy design or by having 1000 tabs open simultaneously. You simply scroll horizontally among your open pages. That's part of the idea behind Xanadu.
However, that's not what this is. This is static content scraped from Wikipedia and my goal is to demonstrate what such a web would look like. I applied it to one subject, namely religion. This is 1000 Wikipedia leads on the subject of religion presented in an interlinked manner, so you can quickly get a general overview of this subject. Why religion? Because it interests me.
Another inspiration for this is TiddlyWiki, which stresses non-lineairity by promoting short articles that are highly interlinked instead of long articles that each have their own TOC. That's why I scraped only the leads.
This is just a first prototype. It's missing a horizontal scrollbar. The website's AI-generated by the way and not everything works but I'm mostly amazed by how well it parses my prompt as well as succeeds in building such a website accurately. Also missing is paragraphing for many articles. I wanted to redo the scraping but it got throttled. And it just contains a list of related articles at the bottom instead of maintaining the inline links. These may be added in a future version. To make the text easier to read, I had it tuck away any parenthetical text in footnotes. This makes a huge difference. Wikipedia leads are really overburdened with parenthetical text.
Once again, it isn't really about the content shared here although it is a fun way to learn. It'd be cool if more of these can be created on different subjects. I might just.
Feedback welcome.
Columns is why I read walls of text like this, lists, and chat, on my narrower vertical monitors.
Missing: Jesuits, Noahide, Satanism, Vatican II, Zionism.
How long did it take you?
I hope so!
Subject recommendations:
I wonder if this concept has been or could be made into a MediaWiki skin.
Very neat!
Neat content.
Neat arrangement.
Would be nice for other broad topics too, though I wouldn't trust WP for some.
Who's site? Yours?
Atheism is not a religion. It's not even a belief, nor a philosophy.
Annoyingly, the left-right scroll at the bottom doesn't float, so you have to scroll down to change focus.
Oh cool, I didn't even realize the scrollbar worked at all. This is an AI-generated website. Knowing that it's there will help me fix it in the next version. Check out my top-level comment, I just finished writing it up. Thanks for your feedback.
I need to learn to use the shift+scroll.
I wonder if Larry Sanger might be interested in this format. His idea is to join all the wikis of the world together somehow so you can contrast different perspectives.
Sad InfoGalactic is gone. Besides getting my own work on it, I'd love to scrape the history of it into a frozen archive or rebirthed project that's more useful than the WayBack. But I can't even update my own wiki's tools, much less keep it up to date or do all the projects I'd like.