This is very cool. Lining up with the text by matching blockquotes is very clever!
Yeah absolutely. I’m curious: how difficult was it to implement this feature? Utilizing blockquotes that way means you don’t have to store side comments any differently really, so maybe it was easy to implement. Then again, things are never as easy as you’d initially expect.
You can see the PR here: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/6023. Calendar-time from first starting on the first prototype to today was ~6 weeks; accounting for unrelated concurrent projects, I’d say I spent 3-4 FTE equivalent weeks on it. The biggest time sinks were HTML-token-stream wrangling to find matches, mark where to highlight, and so on, and UX details of the hoverable comments themselves. There’s also a partially-implemented system in there for shifting things left (closing the ToC if necessary) to get a wider right margin and avoid scrolling, at certain screen widths, which might get deployed later.
There isn’t currently a way to do it. It’s feasible to add, but requires adding a fair bit of new code to deal with vertical sizing and overlap issues. (Currently it relies on the fact that one comment icon aligned with the top of each paragraph is guaranteed to not create any overlap issues.) I’m not sure that expanded-by-default is good to have by default, though; one of the goals of the current design is to minimize intrusiveness; there’s a risk that, with side-comments visible-by-default on the first pass, people would have trouble making it to the end of a post without getting diverted into sidetracks..
I very much appreciate that the relevant text is not highlighted by default, which I’ve always found very intrusive into my reading (on kindle/medium). I think I also prefer not having the comment visible until hover as well.
I agree that the highlights shouldn’t be highlighted by default, and I am not asking for a way to make them highlighted by default, or all highlighted, or all highlighted when all the comments are expanded, or any such thing. (Maybe someone else wants that, but not me.)
I just want to have the option (which can be off by default, and toggled in user settings) all the side comments expanded by default (or with one click). (I don’t want this to result in all the highlights being visible at once!)
I agree with you re: defaults; see my reply to Ben for the feature I think would be good.
As far as v-sizing and overlap issues, I certainly know what you mean. Take a look at the sidenotes layout algorithm in sidenotes.js; you may find it useful to adapt or as inspiration.
This is very cool. Lining up with the text by matching blockquotes is very clever!
Is there some way to make the side comments start out expanded, or expand them all?
Yeah absolutely. I’m curious: how difficult was it to implement this feature? Utilizing blockquotes that way means you don’t have to store side comments any differently really, so maybe it was easy to implement. Then again, things are never as easy as you’d initially expect.
You can see the PR here: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/6023. Calendar-time from first starting on the first prototype to today was ~6 weeks; accounting for unrelated concurrent projects, I’d say I spent 3-4 FTE equivalent weeks on it. The biggest time sinks were HTML-token-stream wrangling to find matches, mark where to highlight, and so on, and UX details of the hoverable comments themselves. There’s also a partially-implemented system in there for shifting things left (closing the ToC if necessary) to get a wider right margin and avoid scrolling, at certain screen widths, which might get deployed later.
Very cool. Thanks for the response.
There isn’t currently a way to do it. It’s feasible to add, but requires adding a fair bit of new code to deal with vertical sizing and overlap issues. (Currently it relies on the fact that one comment icon aligned with the top of each paragraph is guaranteed to not create any overlap issues.) I’m not sure that expanded-by-default is good to have by default, though; one of the goals of the current design is to minimize intrusiveness; there’s a risk that, with side-comments visible-by-default on the first pass, people would have trouble making it to the end of a post without getting diverted into sidetracks..
I very much appreciate that the relevant text is not highlighted by default, which I’ve always found very intrusive into my reading (on kindle/medium). I think I also prefer not having the comment visible until hover as well.
I agree that the highlights shouldn’t be highlighted by default, and I am not asking for a way to make them highlighted by default, or all highlighted, or all highlighted when all the comments are expanded, or any such thing. (Maybe someone else wants that, but not me.)
I just want to have the option (which can be off by default, and toggled in user settings) all the side comments expanded by default (or with one click). (I don’t want this to result in all the highlights being visible at once!)
With one click is something I can get behind.
I agree with you re: defaults; see my reply to Ben for the feature I think would be good.
As far as v-sizing and overlap issues, I certainly know what you mean. Take a look at the sidenotes layout algorithm in sidenotes.js; you may find it useful to adapt or as inspiration.