Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I'd been meaning to write about the <lj-cut> tag for a while, and lately it seems other folks are thinking/writing about them, so I should get this out of my head and onto the ether.

I'm not just thinking about the "use or not use" questions, though I'll start there.

To get the "should I feel I have to use cuts or not" question out of the way right off the top: it's my journal. If I use it as a diary that I just happen to allow my friends to read, then the use of cut-tags really only makes sense when it fits how I am going to want to read my own journal later. And if I use it as a forum, my own little newspaper column without a newspaper, hoping to attract readers for my art and ears for my opinions, then theferrett's admonishment to just write or not write but don't be a wuss about it applies. But if I use it mainly as a way to keep in touch with friends, so that by reading each other's journals we've got some idea what's going on in each other's lives without spending hours each evening on a list of phone calls or all afternoon writing very similar email messages, then using cuts to keep the relevant summary visible to a quick skim but still have full details accessible seems the way to go. Except that none of these three are absolute. The unfairly overtalented weasel (if you're not reading his journal, you probably should be -- the guy can write ... and think) has a point, but one must know one's audience ... and I think that for most bloggers -- yes, there'll be plenty of exceptions -- the reasons-for-blogging and use-of-one's-blog are a mix of these (and probably other) categories, so there's no absolute standard to apply across the board.

A common pattern is to use cuts for fill-in-the-blanks / get-a-cute-picture-and-text "quizzes" -- memes in the coarsest sense of the word[1] -- and for posts that get "too long", where the length threshold is poorly defined and depends partly on subject matter and mood as well as word count. Lately my own usage has been to cut other meme-posts (essay subject memes, short answer memes such as the Friday Five, the regional language questionaire, etc.) -- I almost never post the results of Quizilla tests or the like even when I bother to fill them out -- and to cut tangential asides or lengthy digressions from the middle of "real" (personal stuff I want to say or what's going on in my life) entries. I also cut parts of "really long" entries based simply on a "this is getting too long" gut feeling, but the length required to trigger that feeling has gotten much larger lately. My reasoning on the first category is that those aren't "important" entries, they're "playing along"; they may be interesting to some of my readers, but they're never urgent and I don't usually feel that they're My Work That I want To Show Off as strongly as essays I come up with entirely on my own. They're certainly not too significant for folks to slip right past if they're checking their friends page in a hurry. I don't really have solid reasoning for the third category beyond, "Well I agree with theferrett on an intellectual level but in my gut I'm still scared of annoying readers who think my stuff is too long, so I'm a wuss." ... Though there's also some of my own not-quite-ready-to-be-verbal reactions to use or non-use of cuts for long posts by other people in there.

But It's the second category that really got me thinking about cut-tags. Because the way I try to use them, and the way others seem to use them, appear to fit the way we wish cut-tags work better than the way they actually behave. Perhaps we really need something else, similar to <lj-cut> but better suited to the tangential or parenthetical thought.

First, because of the ability to label cuts with something more meaningful than "Read more..." -- a practice I just encouraged people to use in the cut-tagged digression above -- it's easy to be tempted to label each section / topic of cut text with its own cut-tag. If there's non-cut text in between the cut portions, this makes some sense, but I've seen journal entries consisting of nothing but a series of two to six cut-tags in a row. I've done this. What's silly about that is that it looks as though the idea is to click on just the one(s) that look interesting, but it doesn't matter much which you click, because any will take you to the same page. Six cut-tags in a row function more or less the same as one cut-tag. (Yes, if the sections are long enough, it may be useful to jump directly to the "#label" anchor for the fourth topic instead of having to start at the top -- that's why I said "more or less" -- but clicking on the first tag still shows all six without any visible distinction between them unless the writer uses more than cut-tags to separate the parts.)

So if you're going to include multiple cuts in a row, consider adding <hr> or <h2>topic header</h2> or some other visual break to show where the logical sections start. Assuming that's the way you were thinking when you put the cut tags in there, anyhow.

Second, it's easy to fall into the trap of assuming your readers will experience your entry in the same linear fashion you envisioned when you assembled it -- see it on their friends page with the cut-tag text, click on the link, and immediately see what was behind the cut. Cryptic-and-clever or cryptic-to-be-funny link-texts work this way, as do cuts where the link text is the first few words of the cut text. The problem is that not everybody will read your entry that way. I, for example, am likely to tell my browser "open in background window" to read your cut text so that I can continue scrolling down my friends page while the page containing your full text trickles through my modem (or just so that I can hurry up and get caught up on the gist of what my friends are up to while accumulating a stack of "read the details in a little while" windows to come back to). So when I do see what you cut, it's not immediately after I saw the clever tag.

But there's an even bigger issue than Glenn's peculiar way of reading on the web. What if you said something interesting enough that one of your regular readers wants to point it out to somebody else? They're going to send them (or post in their own journal) a link to that particular entry, right? Now you've got a bunch of readers coming in who've never even seen the clever cut-tag at all! And if you used the first few words of the paragraph as the link text, they're seeing a paragraph that starts in the middle of a sentence (unless you repeated those few words inside the cut [hint hint]).

I'm not sure what to suggest doing about the problem of readers following a link directly to an entry and thus missing the clever cut-tags. Just be aware of the problem and make your own solutions -- or your own decisions about how important the problem is -- on a case-by-case basis. Much of the time simply repeating the cut-tag-text inside the cut-tag will do.

Third (and this may be just me), I keep wanting to use cut-tags for tangents, footnotes, digressions, parenthetical explanations, and "I wanted to make it look like I could be concise but I really wanted to say these other things as well" games. Basically, any time I have something that logically belongs in-line, but which I fear will be too much of an interruption in the flow of ideas (or just make an essay look to frighteningly long to get into) if I leave it there. And this is really something for which cut-tags are remarkably unsuited, but as I have no better tool, I abuse the tools I have. (When all you have is a Dremmel, every problem looks like a piece of brass. Or something like that.)

I do use footnotes, but if the footnotes are inside a cut, the links to them will only work when the cut text is already visible. So the footnotes have to be outside the cuts.

And sometimes, for a digression or for what really ought to be a "sidebar" if this were a magazine instead of a blog, I want the cut text to be easy to skip over even when someone is reading the entire entry. Ideally I'd like to have a type of cut which appears on the full-entry page the way lj-cut does on a group-of-entries page[2], and gets expanded from there if the reader so desires. Or something that pops up when needed and vanishes when done with (in a way that's portable to older browsers, text-only browsers, browsers with JavaScript turned off ... and easily archivable using the LiveJournal export page).

I can achieve part of this by setting the cut text off as I've done in this entry, with a grey box to make it look sort of sidebar-ish despite still being inline. (I wonder whether I should also have marked it <small>.) I'm not absolutely certain what I did works correctly on everybody's browser yet, but it's a start. I could perhaps use CSS positioning codes to render such things as actual sidebars, but I am pretty certain that will break in somebody's browser, or cause uncomfortable column-width issues for somebody's window size. (First, I've seen how badly even the CSS code designed to show off how portable CSS is can break; second, whatever CSS tricks I do have to play nicely with whatever layout the containing LiveJournal page is putting around it.)

Perhaps theferrett doesn't seem to have these problems because he has mad editing chops to go with his mad writing skills. Or maybe I'm trying to write things for which LiveJournal is simply the wrong medium, and I'm abusing the whole LiveJournal tool, not just the lj-cut tool, out of a combination of laziness (posting to LJ is more convenient than adding pages to my web site) and the (possibly mistaken?) perception that this is where my biggest audience (for essays) is.

Or maybe, just maybe, "we" really do need more tools within LiveJournal. But that's true only if other people are running into the same problems I am and these problems are not merely symptomatic of writers who shouldn't be their own editors.

Anyhow... there you have my observations of, and problems with, <lj-cut> tags. What I see as the easy traps to fall into (because I constantly see people fall into them), and my own frustration regarding what I keep wanting cut-tags to be that they really aren't. And now I can cross one item off my "LJ entries to get around to writing" list.

[1] That use of the word "meme", common on LiveJournal, is technically correct, but just about the least useful of the correct meanings. Yes, I'll use the word that way myself because it's part of the way we use language here, but "assignments" such as "100 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Me", the "Interview Meme", or the Friday Five are, I think, closer to the germ of the "meme" concept in that they are ideas and thought patterns rather than mere fads. Of course, even those don't touch on what's really significant about the "meme" concept the way that making a common noun of "santorum" is, or the word "cisgendered", "whitespace", Ugol's Law, or inalienable rights. So I'm not going to argue that calling those quizzie-thingies "memes" is incorrect -- it actually is one of the correct uses of the word "meme" -- but I am going to note that they're not great examples of what memes are.

[2] "Friends" page, "Recent entries" page, or view-by-day page.