Could we please have a clickable arrow to expand hidden content?

Question

For many questions/answers where I wish to provide background, explanation, mildly extraneous detail, etc., I would really like to have that little arrow thingee that one sees in the FAQ:

To partially mitigate all of the TL;DR comments (note there are quite a few -- even on meta), I feel that this could significantly improve the readability of the higher quality questions.

Use cases:

1. Questions which include background/motivational information such as:

   • Several questions like this one have an "additional details for clarification" which could be collapsed.

   • I tried to be a bit more rigid in my earliest questions on Stack Overflow <- much of the background info is completely extraneous.

2. Answers which have logical divisions between compartments of information:

   • extended answers like this one
      
     

3. This could also be used to temporarily hide large screen shots or large blocks of code, but I'm hesitant to even suggest this because I really don't want any excuse for posting more than 25-30 lines of code.

Answer 1

I'd love to see the existing spoiler be enhanced for that. The syntax is:

>! Spoiler text

Lacking a proper hover on some devices, the new mobile sites render this as:

On the regular websites, one still needs to hover the hidden text to reveal it. This includes tablets like the iPad, where not everyone knows that hovering is initiated by tapping first. And it shows many blank lines for long spoilers. Like:

Moon languages rock!

From http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moon_language
Noun
moon language (plural moon languages)

1. (slang) Text written in an incomprehensible script, especially Japanese or Chinese.

_{(Multi-line spoilers need Markdown double-spaces to get a newline. Automatic lists, headings, et cetera are not supported.)}

I'd like something similar to the mobile sites on the regular sites too, but:

• Labeled "Click to show hidden text" (rather than "spoiler").
• Maybe a single link to show all hidden text? (That might not be too nice for real spoilers.)

On the other hand: beware that the handling of Markdown within the spoilers is very limited. One cannot easily change an existing block into a spoiler.

(Click the "mobile" link at the bottom of this page to see the mobile rendering in a regular browser too. To switch back, click "full site", though that does not look like a link.)

Answer 2

I am looking at posting a question that will need to include, or link to, the contents of a sizable-ish log file. There's certainly sites like pastebin that I could use, but linking to the data with it placed on any external site means I'd run the risk of the question still existing at some time in the future but the linked data no longer being accessible.

This could be a problem if said data was required by some future person looking at the question to determine if the issue they're having is the same as the one I did, and hence whether the answers might also help them.

So I'd like to post the log data on the particular stackexchange site along with the question - but would like someone to be able to have an overview of the question - without all of the log data shoved in their face - and decide whether this is a question that they want to try to answer (or if the answers to it might or definitely would not be helpful to them), before then being able to cause the text area storing the (initially hidden) log data to expand and display it if they decide they want to see it.

The >! spoiler thing mentioned in Arjan's answer is something I wasn't aware of, and is interesting, but obviously not usable for this issue, for the reason he/she outlined - it's not expandable/shrinkable, so there would be a great big blank area in the middle of the answer.

One could simply reference the log date in the question itself and place the data at the bottom of the question (like a footnote), but people would still need to scroll through it to get to the answer section if they wanted to i.e. see if someone had already given an answer that they'd thought of.

Of course there might be similar cases where the log data (or whatever other type of data it may be) is crucial to having any real understanding of the question at all, and others where poster thinks the log data may or may not be relevant at all, and everywhere in between, and in some of these cases it might be preferable to simply have the data permanently displayed inline, but I think it's fair to state that there are at least some legitimate use cases for an initially hidden, expandable text region.