As for the Ajax-style approach, it's my understanding in that case you are having every user load all the data on the page, but just not showing some of it, but a goal here is to be able to present more stories in less space and keep the page size managable.
Not necessarily. The script could also load the additional text on demand with an XMLHTTPRequest.
But I think maybe this is a little over-engineering. Think about it. Lets say you have 10 stories with a "read more" link. And lets say each has an additional 30 lines of text with 100 characters each. All in all the additional data would amount to about 30 KB, which is nothing. I understand keeping the stories short for the presentation, but I don't think the size is an issue, even if all the invisible text is loaded from the beginning. As an added bonus, if everything is already loaded then clicking on the link would expand the text instantly, instead of having to load new data over the net.
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