I was originally imagining something more like a list (“decision theory explained in six posts!”); having a DAG of post dependencies might also be possible (which would enable stuff like “okay, you want to read this post? We’ve put all the prereqs in order into your reading queue.”) but it’s not clear to me how much people would want to use it.
Whatever the data-structure for the sequences is, the goal is to present the user a linear sequence of content (which might be dynamically generated from a dependency DAG).
It’s really hard to keep track of your position in a tree, and practically all projects that I know of that tried to present complicated information a tree-view either failed or moved to a linear view eventually (for example Khan Academy)
Hm. What I want is a tree which is really just a linear structure functionally speaking (no automatic queuing of prerequisites or anything), but which allows more visual organization of a long sequence into parts for sanity’s sake. I’d get >90% of the functionality I want just by being allowed to intersperse headers on a “sequence” page to organize sub-sequences. The sequences themselves currently have one more level of organization than that, with “books” and then “sections”—so you can think of them as one long sequence with six sub-sequences and twenty-six sub-sub-sequences. That’s the kind of hierarchical organization I’m asking for.
I was originally imagining something more like a list (“decision theory explained in six posts!”); having a DAG of post dependencies might also be possible (which would enable stuff like “okay, you want to read this post? We’ve put all the prereqs in order into your reading queue.”) but it’s not clear to me how much people would want to use it.
Whatever the data-structure for the sequences is, the goal is to present the user a linear sequence of content (which might be dynamically generated from a dependency DAG).
It’s really hard to keep track of your position in a tree, and practically all projects that I know of that tried to present complicated information a tree-view either failed or moved to a linear view eventually (for example Khan Academy)
Hm. What I want is a tree which is really just a linear structure functionally speaking (no automatic queuing of prerequisites or anything), but which allows more visual organization of a long sequence into parts for sanity’s sake. I’d get >90% of the functionality I want just by being allowed to intersperse headers on a “sequence” page to organize sub-sequences. The sequences themselves currently have one more level of organization than that, with “books” and then “sections”—so you can think of them as one long sequence with six sub-sequences and twenty-six sub-sub-sequences. That’s the kind of hierarchical organization I’m asking for.