Stretchtext for Netscape 4 - Introduction

Note: The following discussion discusses the Netscape 4 browser. Netscape 6 is currently available and should support easier methods than those described here. I hope that, in the near future, these pages will be of only historical interest.

Stretchtext is a term coined by Ted Nelson to describe a form of hypertext that is able to become more detailed or less detailed. Here is his description of stretchtext (from Dream Machines (1987 edition), page 134):

There are a screen and two throttles. The first throttle moves the text forward and backward, up and down on the screen. The second throttle causes changes in the writing itself: throttling toward you causes the text to become longer by minute degrees. Gaps appear between phrases; new words and phrases pop into the gaps, an item at a time. Push back on the throttle and the writing becomes short and less difficult.

The purpose of this online experiment is to implement stretchtext on Netscape 4, using Javascript, CSS, and DOM where appropriate. The problem is that, for the most part (the exceptions being the <layer> tag and a few others), Netscape doesn't reflow text (unlike Internet Exploder) except when loading the page. The next page and other pages in this series demonstrate some ways of getting around this limitation.

There are a few constraints I want to keep in mind:

• I've only looked at client-side solutions here. Certainly a server-side script would work (and universally as well), but that's not what I'm trying to do here.
• Does it work? It doesn't solve the problem if it doesn't. If it also works on IE, that's a bonus.
• The solution to the problem shouldn't be too complex, or take up too much space.
• Graceful degradation: Browsers without Javascript should be able to view the message in its entirety. I don't want to create pages that, without Javascript, don't render properly, or contain multiple copies of text, or are otherwise flawed.