As an American, I'm constantly confused by this when watching UK television.
I would call the [ a "bracket", and only if I had to clarify would I say "square bracket" to distinguish it from a curly brace { (which is sometimes called a curly bracket) and I don't think most Americans would even consider a ( a type of bracket at all.
If I had to come up with a rationale, I would say that physical brackets are almost always more square than round, and a bracket graphic in the sense of a sports bracket is also usually square, so brackets are square!
I asked "which dialect of English calls parentheses 'brackets'", but apparently I got it backwards, and it's only US English which makes the distinction!
I actually prefer the US usage, as "parenthesis" is such a lovely metonym that describes the thing it encloses.
People are used to indicating so anyway in speech (referring to a parenthetical remark). And while in writing parentheses can acceptably be set off in a variety of ways, I have a fondness for the good old parenthetical brackets.
> Curious: in which branch of English dialect are parentheses called "brackets"?
Quoting Wikipedia:
> In most English-speaking countries, an unqualified word "bracket" refers to the parenthesis (round bracket); in the United States, the square bracket.
> What makes the technique useless for your reading/browsing experience?
It is entirely a matter of personal preference; I tend to read very quickly, and long complex sentences laden with parentheticals are more enjoyable than obstacular.
What is bracket folding? What kind of brackets is this even talking about? Read the whole page, tried to interact with the “Try it here” section, still have no clue whatsoever what this is supposed to be.
> What is bracket folding? What kind of brackets is this even talking about?
The concept of collapsing any text between brackets "(" and ")". Like code folding in IDEs but for the web, mainly for reading long articles blown up by tons of brackets. Wikipedia is a good example.
> tried to interact with the “Try it here” section
Make sure to enable the checkbox on the right side of the demo saying "Collapse brackets", toggling it will turn every pair of brackets into an interactive element, collapsed by default, expandable as needed.
In general parentheses in text should arguably be avoided in text. They almost always make the text harder to read. You can generally re-arrange the text to be clearer, sometimes by simply removing the parenthesis, in others by moving the aside to its own paragraph.
Thanks noting StretchTex. Never heard about it before. Indeed, it shares the same motivation: Allowing users to decide what and in which detail they want to read at.
I would love to see your conclusion about the usage of parentheses respected by authors more often, it makes content so much more accessible and would make a solution like this obsolete.
Interesting idea. I definitely wouldn't use it. I don't trust that parenthesized information is generally omittable, and I don't want to do lots of clicking.
I would consider localizing for en-US visitors as many will have no idea what you mean by “brackets”.
I would also suggest that you actually make the landing page “work”, whatever that means for your tool, with no extension — on mobile I could not make it do anything at all.
True. I've to commit that I'm not a big fan of the classic approach of footnotes at the bottom of the page.
It doesn't feel like a very nice fit in the context of a digital reading experience. Forcing the user to leave the current reading position to get the additional information at the bottom of the page, and struggling to find back into the text.
But I guess this only applies to the classic implementation of footnotes at the bottom of the page. I assume there are better implementations with a more digital character available.
Or replace brackets with commas (nobody would usually notice the difference.) I started doing it in my own writing (or I just drop the text inside the brackets.)
In those cases with valuable and informative content in brackets, I would love to see more authors integrating the content into the sentence directly or adding a new sentence.
This is a clever little hack which I do not want at all, but I admire the author's creativity in coming up with it.