Multi-viewing cards
Currently, my cards are exported to the Web as individual hyperlinked HTML docs. This is perfectly fine. More than fine, I should always retain this export for maximum portability (i.e. they’ll always work in something like Lynx).
But what I’m losing is the ability to view a bunch of related cards at one time like I could with physical index cards in a traditional zettelkasten.
This is not just annoying, it’s limiting.
I never really "got" the TiddlyWiki method of appending a newly-opened link at the bottom of the page and scrolling to it.
I mean, I understood what was happening and it’s kinda neat. But it wasn’t until I returned to it not with the context of full-size Wikipedia-like articles, but with the context of a collection of tiny, "zettel-like" notes. Suddenly, being able to open a bunch of little documents and scroll up and down to read them all becomes very attractive.
I bet there’s also a TON of research out there with innovative ideas for displaying hypertext on a computer screen that I’ve never even considered.
"On top of this basic idea, Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which the reader could choose their own path through an electronic document. He built upon this idea in a paper to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1965, calling the new idea 'zippered lists'. These zippered lists would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, a concept named transclusion."