Taking Abstracts Seriously about template HOT 5 OPEN

Interesting to think how this fits in with the existing views of an article. Currently there exist the headline + image on the landing page, which leads to the long-form article. An abstract feels like it would be in between these views—though that's not necessarily how it should be navigated.

I could see them as full page views containing a custom mashup of a traditional abstract, most insightful figure/interaction and big picture/insight. They would need to be authored separately.

Contrast or compare this with strong hero elements which @shancarter says start to feel more like an independent entity already:

The more the hero or title page is interesting content and self contained, the more it because [becomes?] a full-fledged atomic unit of the web

Would an abstract serve a different purpose? Maybe more to depict the insight of the article, whereas a hero element might be more concerned with introducing the topic or problem the article studies?

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BTW, Nature has the abstract serve the double purpose of being the first paragraph of their letters. It's an interesting form. Here's a pretty interesting example, in machine learning: http://www.davidqiu.com:8888/research/nature14236.pdf

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CC @mnielsen

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It's interesting to think about the emotional experience a reader has. SIGGRAPH abstracts sometimes make an impact that you remember years later. The pix2pix demo had the same flavour: https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/ A good traditional abstract conveys the core point of the paper. Perhaps a good Distill abstract conveys in a more vivid, embodied (?) form the core point of the paper.

It's interesting to think about what would make the pix2pix demo better, if it were considered as a Distill abstract. I think it'd (a) more vividly convey the many tasks (e.g., map-to-photo, night-to-day etc) pix2pix can do; and (b) it might well be shorter.

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