Essay Input

[<h2>A Short Nesting Doc About Nesting Docs</h2>
 By Weston Beecroft
 [ Sometimes you don’t want to read all of what someone has written. [Example| If you've ever read the blog of Weston Beecroft, you'll note periodic gems—or perhaps 'raisins' would be more appropriate—floating amid a sea of minutia and distraction. You don't want to read all of it.] This is not necessarily because of anything intrinsic in the writing, but rather because readers differ in the knowledge and interest they bring to a particular reading. Sometimes an author has much more they'd like to say [Justification| The reader will grant me the weaker assertion that there has existed or exists an author who had more (or has more) they'd like to say—though not necessarily 'much more'. Given that some author once had more to say (or is now desiring to say more), and given that people in general typically have much more to say, and given that we have no other prior information about our author except that he or she is an author, the general tendency of whom it is to say more than non-authors, the reader must conclude along with this author that, most probably, the author somewhere who once had more to say (or desires to say more now) in fact had much more to say.], but must cut everything but the best. [Elaboration| This is a good principle in general, but again, readers vary, and some would be interested in that cruft. [Justification| Most people reading your stuff aren't that interested. If you say something great right away, they may skim a few more sentences. However, occasionally, it's possible, some really eccentric fellow comes along, right, and just loves what you wrote and will read endless amounts of it given the opportunity.]] So, the idea here is to abstract [Definition | (by which I mean to create an alternate representation which contains less information than the original. [Elaboration | Interestingly, by the way, 'to abstract', while perhaps lacking the glamour and charisma of certain other words, is at least a favorite term of computer scientists everywhere, and by association gains some degree of credibility.])] over certain subsections of documents, replacing the actual text with labeled 'nodes' indicating the purpose of their corresponding text; if the reader is interested, they may choose to expand a given node by clicking, at which point it will be replaced with the concrete [Definition | (by 'concrete' I mean 'not abstract')] text (and if this text is clicked, it collapses back into the node).][Illustration| To be a little more concrete about how one might use this, I'll point out that its origin was an attempt to address this problem I kept running into: I had a bunch of different things I wanted to write about which shared some underlying concepts, but I didn't want to pollute all the different essays be re-explaining the foundational stuff in each essay. Using this scheme, it wasn't a big deal if I just copied and pasted some definition or whatever from another essay into the present one, since if readers were already familiar with the term it would be easy for them to skip the definition. I actually don't think that's an ideal use-case for it, though. Then again, I still haven't tried, so who knows?]

The software involved in making this is re-usable! [Clarification| In other words, it's general enough to work for other essays too, not just this one.] You just have to mark up your document to indicate node placement [Note | Try it out in the text area below!], and the software parses and renders things correctly. [Caveat| Except when you run into a bug, in which case parsing and/or rendering will take place incorrectly. [Justification| By definition, bugs are instances of software not executing correctly; therefore, if the software's capabilities are parsing and rendering, and a bug is encountered, either parsing or rendering will not execute correctly.]] It would be way nicer if there was some kind of WYSIWYG [Definition| ('what you see is what you get'; pronounced 'wizzy wig')] editor, rather than having to manually mark up documents.]