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‘design’ directory

Screenshot of Gwern.net demonstrating recursive popup functionality, allowing arbitrarily deep hypertext exploration of references and links.

Meta page de­scrib­ing Gwern.net, the self-documenting web­site’s im­ple­men­ta­tion and ex­per­i­ments for bet­ter ‘se­man­tic zoom’ of hy­per­text; tech­ni­cal de­ci­sions using Mark­down and sta­tic host­ing.

Gwern.net is im­ple­mented as a sta­tic web­site com­piled via Hakyll from Pan­doc Mark­down and hosted on a ded­i­cated server (due to ex­pen­sive cloud band­width).

It stands out from your stan­dard Mark­down sta­tic web­site by aim­ing at good ty­pog­ra­phy, fast per­for­mance, and ad­vanced hy­per­text brows­ing fea­tures (at the cost of great im­ple­men­ta­tion com­plex­ity); the ⁠4 de­sign prin­ci­ples are: aesthetically-pleasing min­i­mal­ism, ac­ces­si­bil­ity/progressive-enhancement, speed, and a ‘se­man­tic zoom’ ap­proach to hy­per­text use.

Un­usual fea­tures in­clude the mono­chrome es­thet­ics, side­notes in­stead of foot­notes on wide win­dows, ef­fi­cient drop­caps, small­caps, col­lapsi­ble sec­tions, au­to­matic inflation-adjusted cur­rency, Wikipedia-style link icons & in­foboxes, cus­tom syn­tax high­light­ing, ex­ten­sive local archives to fight linkrot, and an ecosys­tem of “popup”/“popover” an­no­ta­tions & pre­views of links for fric­tion­less brows­ing—the net ef­fect of hi­er­ar­chi­cal struc­tures with col­laps­ing and in­stant popup ac­cess to ex­cerpts en­ables iceberg-like pages where most in­for­ma­tion is hid­den but the reader can eas­ily drill down as deep as they wish. (For a demo of all fea­tures & stress-test page, see Lorem Ipsum.)

Also dis­cussed are the many failed ex­per­i­ments/changes made along the way.

See Also

Gwern

“Cleanup When: Before or After? ”, Gwern 2022

⁠Cleanup When: Before or After?

“Rock-Paper-Scissors Optimality ”, Gwern 2024

⁠Rock-Paper-Scissors Optimality

“Celebrity Masquerade Game ”, Gwern 2009

Celebrity Masquerade Game

“Towards Better RSS Feeds for Gwern.net ”, Gwern 2024

Towards Better RSS Feeds for Gwern.net

“Hierarchical Embeddings for Text Search ”, Gwern 2024

Hierarchical Embeddings for Text Search

“‘Tools For Thought’ Work Fails: Lots of Tools Work, Not Thought ”, Gwern 2024

‘Tools For Thought’ Work Fails: Lots of Tools Work, Not Thought

“Virtual Comments: LLM Idea for Writing LessWrong Posts ”, Gwern 2024

Virtual comments: LLM idea for writing LessWrong posts

“Research Ideas ”, Gwern 2017

Research Ideas

“About This Website ”, Gwern 2010

About This Website

“Hybridizing Forums and Wikis Proposal ”, Gwern 2024

Hybridizing forums and wikis proposal

“Nenex: A Neural Personal Wiki Idea ”, Gwern 2023

Nenex: A Neural Personal Wiki Idea

Cat Itecture: Better Cat Window Boxes ”, Gwern 2023

Cat itecture: Better Cat Window Boxes

“Twitter Follow-Request UX Problems ”, Gwern 2023

Twitter Follow-Request UX Problems

“Open Questions ”, Gwern 2018

Open Questions

“Why Do Hipsters Steal Stuff? ”, Gwern 2022

Why Do Hipsters Steal Stuff?

“Technology Holy Wars Are Coordination Problems ”, Gwern 2020

Technology Holy Wars are Coordination Problems

“On Having Enough Socks ”, Gwern 2017

On Having Enough Socks

“Bitcoin Is Worse Is Better ”, Gwern 2011

Bitcoin Is Worse Is Better

“Candy Japan’s New Box A/B Test ”, Gwern 2016

Candy Japan’s new box A/B test

“Wikipedia and Other Wikis ”, Gwern 2009

Wikipedia and Other Wikis

Miscellaneous