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Guide To Navigation—expand & contract

Many pages at Electricka's web site contain information that does not appear on a page until you exercise your option to see it. The feature that makes it possible for you to see such additional information is called Expand & Contract. Here, Electricka explains the nature of this feature and how to use it.

about expand & contract

The Expand & Contract feature on a page allows you to see hidden information or ignore it at your convenience.

Here's what it does:

  • When a page that employs the Expand & Contract feature opens, some portions of the page are visible, some hidden.
  • The hidden portions are associated with visible ones. Each hidden portion contains information that amplifies or augments the visible portion with which it is associated.
  • You have the opportunity to inspect the visible portion to decide if you want to see the hidden portion that is associated with it.
  • If you make the hidden portion visible, you have the ability to hide it whenever you want. You can go back and forth from hidden to visible to hidden as many times as you like.

More About Expand & Contract

The feature that makes it possible for you to see or hide information is called Expand & Contract because, when invoked, the feature adds more information to the initially visible portion of information it relates to; it expands and amplifies what the initially visible portion has to say.

The feature is also called Expand & Contract because when you elect to see an additional portion of information, the additional portion appears on the page directly below the space occupied by the visible portion that it augments. When the feature is invoked, the new information seems to appear out of nowhere, expanding into the space on the page directly below the visible information it amplifies. The page itself seems to expand. You may cause the expanded portion to disappear at any time. When you do so, the page seems to contract.

The Expand & Contract feature also goes by the name Twisties. In "twisities" lingo, each hidden information portion is referred to as a twistie. The hidden portion is called a twistie because of the behavior of an arrow that is placed at the left side of each visible portion on the page that has an associated hidden portion:

  • When the page opens, the arrow points to the right to mark the fact that additional hidden information exists for this visible portion.
  • When the right-pointing arrow is clicked, the hidden portion appears. The arrow now points downward toward the hidden portion displayed below the visible portion. The arrow seems to have twisted from a horizontal, right-pointing orientation to a vertical, downward-pointing orientation.
  • When the arrow is clicked again, the newly-displayed information disappears and arrow "twists" in the opposite direction, back to horizontal.

Benefits

The Expand & Contract feature provides these benefits:

See Benefits

  • A page can appear cluttered or confusing when all the information it contains is displayed at once upon opening, especially if it contains a lot of information. Hiding some of the information can reduce this clutter.
  • Since some of the information on the page is hidden when it opens, a visitor can be selective about what he sees:
    • He can inspect the visible information to decide whether to see the associated hidden information.
    • He doesn't have to examine portions on the page that are hidden unless and until he decides that he is ready for them.
  • Since a visitor can be selective about what to see and when to see it, a page with Expand & Contract is simpler and easier to analyze and absorb that it would be if all the information it contains were visible when it opens. A visitor can inspect visible portions one at a time, deciding for each portion whether to see the hidden portion that is associated with it.
  • The ability to selectively see or ignore portions of a page can be especially helpful if a page is visited often and contains large quantities of information, but a visitor just wants to inspect portions that may have changed since the last visit.
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