Responsive text

Some websites now contain 'responsive images'. These scale (or crop) depending upon your screen's viewing area, so the image sizes remain appropriate whether you're looking at the website on a mobile phone, or on a huge flat screen monitor.

This is an example of responsive text.

The amount of textual detail scales relative to your screen size.

The effect is achieved using simple HTML class names and CSS media queries which show or hide the content depending upon the current screen width.

It's a bit of an experiment, and I'm not really sure how useful it really is, but I think it's an interesting idea.

It could also perhaps be combined with some form of a user interface that allows you to control how much text you want to read. This might be really useful for news articles, for instance – you could decide whether to read full quotes and a detailed backstory, or just the gist.