Prescripts: Authoring With Templates

This paper is written as a stretchtext, which means that it will be longer or shorter at your wish. It is divided in four chapters, and each chapter has a few sentences of the abstract as an introduction. Each chapter consists of two to four pages, and these pages may be shorter or longer as you "stretch" to include additional paragraphs or "collapse" to leave paragraphs out.

To read the abstract, read just the chapter introductions in sequence. If you read all the pages in each chapter without stretching them, you are reading a "short paper." If you stretch out all the pages fully, you read a "full paper." You are of course free to choose any length between these points.

The stretching function requires a fairly new browser with JavaScript enabled. Popup window blocking should be off for best effect.

Test it!

To be specific, your browser needs to support the Document Object Model (DOM) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) level 1. Test your browser by clicking the "collapse" link below. If this paragraph doesn't disappear, you need to turn on JavaScript, or get a more recent browser, like the ones recommended by Browse happy.

(collapse)

Follow this link to start reading >>

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Daniel Dayan for suggesting the term prescripts for the limitations of templates.

I am also grateful to those who have read and commented on earlier versions of this paper: Terje Rasmussen, Gunnar Liestøl, Lars Nyre, Arnt Maasø, Tanja Storsul, Tor Brekke Skjøtskift, and Faltin Karlsen.

This research is funded by Social Transformation of the Internet III, a project under the Norwegian Research Council's "KIM" program.