Let's stretch
Nate Matias's Tinderbox Stretchtext Writing System is terrific and has lots of features. But how might we use stretchtext in everyday hypertexts, like this one?
Let's make a Tinderbox macro. For example, I often like to quote things like this:
‘TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
When I'm writing, I don’t want to worry about formatting — and over the years, the way formatting works keeps changing. So, I just use a Tinderbox macro
^do(quote,'Terence, this is stupid stuff...')
and the macro remembers whether we're using <blockquote> or <div class="quotation"> or whatever, this year.
So, how might stretchtext work? I think we’ll want three arguments:
- a tag or id number, so the pieces of the stretchtext will know how to find each other. We could probably generate it automatically, but let's just invent it for now.
- the label that appears when the text is unstretched.
- the text that appears when the label is clicked
So, we'll say