I like your suggestion of adding mouseover text to hyperlinks. I know how to do it in HTML, but how do you accomplish it in LW comment markup?
To my mind, an author who does not provide links is pretending to know exactly what his reader’s background is and exactly what the reader wants to learn. So, when that author meets his ideal imagined reader, they together achieve a masterpiece of efficient communication.
An author who does provide links, on the other hand, can create a very satisfactory communication experience for a large variety of readers. A communication experience which can be enjoyed more than once by a single reader. An experience that teaches the reader things that even the author didn’t know.
I like an article with links.
I can think of some possible browser apps/extensions that might alleviate the issue. … But forcing people to acquire a particular app isn’t the best of solutions.
There are a variety of add-ons out there, and they work for the reader without any special effort by the author. So there is no question of “forcing people to acquire a particular app”. I use Read It Later on Firefox.
I actually didn’t figure out how to do it in Less Wrong Markup, I just went into HTML mode, which doesn’t seem to work for comments. So thanks for that.
The one issue with mouseover text is that it takes a pretty long time to appear (often longer than it takes to load a webpage). I’m not sure if that’s a setting that can be changed in browsers, or is unique to individual sites, or what.
I’ve actually seen it used pretty effectively on some forums, where mousing over a thread title shows you the first few sentences of a thread. That would be a great feature for Less Wrong, if we made it a convention for the first few sentences to summarize the article.
Or… does this site have a glossary? That might help dramatically.
To my mind, an author who does not provide links is pretending to know exactly what his reader’s background is and exactly what the reader wants to learn. So, when that author meets his ideal imagined reader, they together achieve a masterpiece of efficient communication.
I do think linkage is important. My issue is not that references should not be provided. Just that the way we currently provide them is at odds with how brains tend to actually process information longterm.
I like your suggestion of adding mouseover text to hyperlinks. I know how to do it in HTML, but how do you accomplish it in LW comment markup?
To my mind, an author who does not provide links is pretending to know exactly what his reader’s background is and exactly what the reader wants to learn. So, when that author meets his ideal imagined reader, they together achieve a masterpiece of efficient communication.
An author who does provide links, on the other hand, can create a very satisfactory communication experience for a large variety of readers. A communication experience which can be enjoyed more than once by a single reader. An experience that teaches the reader things that even the author didn’t know.
I like an article with links.
There are a variety of add-ons out there, and they work for the reader without any special effort by the author. So there is no question of “forcing people to acquire a particular app”. I use Read It Later on Firefox.
Like this.
Which you get from this code:
Cool!
I actually didn’t figure out how to do it in Less Wrong Markup, I just went into HTML mode, which doesn’t seem to work for comments. So thanks for that.
The one issue with mouseover text is that it takes a pretty long time to appear (often longer than it takes to load a webpage). I’m not sure if that’s a setting that can be changed in browsers, or is unique to individual sites, or what.
I’ve actually seen it used pretty effectively on some forums, where mousing over a thread title shows you the first few sentences of a thread. That would be a great feature for Less Wrong, if we made it a convention for the first few sentences to summarize the article.
Or… does this site have a glossary? That might help dramatically.
I do think linkage is important. My issue is not that references should not be provided. Just that the way we currently provide them is at odds with how brains tend to actually process information longterm.