(And Why We’re Not There Yet)

There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times today about Paul Otlet, who in 1934 sketched out plans for a network of computers that would allow people to search through a global archive of interlinked documents. Though his system at the time was just a mechanical, albeit very robust card catalog; he foresaw the age of electronic media storage when one could sit comfortably at his desk and peer into data collections around the world through “electronic telescopes” (I just love that term).

Aside from a little forgotten computer lore his story highlights the most fundamental underpinning of the Internet and perhaps the most important invention of the modern age — the hyperlink. As we surf our favorite blogs and forums, it’s easy to take for granted the ability to instantly navigate from within one document to another. But the idea and it’s implementation have it’s own interesting histories and failings — with hypertext it’s important to know not only where you went, but how you got there.

What happens when a link becomes its own document? How was the hyperlink envisioned and then implemented, and perhaps more important — how can it be improved?

In 1945 Vannevar Bush wrote an essay titled As We May Think which argued that as humans turned away from war, science should also turn from increasing physical abilities to making knowledge more accessible. In it he described a theoretical machine called a “memex” (memory extender) which would enhance human memory by allowing the user to store and retrieve documents linked by associations. Bush described a microfilm-based machine in which one could link any two pages of information into a “trail” of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The essay predicted technologies such as personal computers, the Internet, online encyclopedias and speech recognition. The latter expressed his fundamental view that computers would interact with man — and also highlights his lack of understanding of the complexities of information science and the human-computer interface. In fact it would be human beings who would change their behavior to interact with a rigid machine using unnatural inputs such as a keyboard and mouse pointer. By the time technology can accommodate such things as fluid speech and movement interaction, our “natural” inclinations may well have already changed.

It was from As We May Think that inspired Ted Nelson in 1965 to first coin the term “hypertext”. It was for his Project Xanadu which had the goal of “facilitating non-sequential writing in which the reader could choose his or her own path through an electronic document.” This system was built on top of work he did as a graduate student developing a less lofty idea, but perhaps more practical one — a word processor capable of storing multiple versions, and displaying the differences between these versions. That Project Xanadu didn’t even release an (incomplete) implementation until 1998 shows how far that dream came, nonetheless, the idea and vision were already set in motion.

In 1966 a team at the Stanford Research Institute lead by Douglas Englebart first implemented the practical use of the hyperlink in their NLS “oN-Line System”, first for scrolling within a single document and later connecting between paragraphs in separate documents. This thing must have been a damn wonder to behold at the time, the NLS system used a mouse (co-invented by Englebart), had video monitors, screen windowing, and presentation programs. In 1968 they demonstrated it’s features at a computer conference in San Francisco, which has become affectionately known as “The Mother of All Demos”. It was the first time the public saw a mouse, introduced interactive text, teleconferencing, video conferencing, email, and of course the use of hypertext. Good thing I wasn’t around in 1968 or my head would have exploded:

A true marvel of the twentieth century whose fatal flaw was that it was next to impossible to actually use. It made heavy use of “programming modes” and you had learn cryptic mnemonic codes to do anything useful. And if you didn’t want to use a keyboard you had to learn 5-bit binary code, which just sounds like a pure joy to learn I’m sure. Eventually many of the top researchers left and ended up at Xerox PARC taking the mouse idea with them.

So fast forward to 1989 when an English computer scientist working for CERN by the name of Timothy Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet.
“I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web.”
Oh that’s all? Since then he’s been working to develop Web standards and been knighted by the Queen. And I guess you can thank him for being able to read this blog now.

But Is That It?

When you look back upon the history of the hyperlink you start to appreciate the idea of the hyperlink. It is unfortunate that what we have today is a rather “dumb” version of it, carrying little more than a destination address. Paul Otlet envisioned a smarter kind hyperlink that could for example, carry information annotating if particular document agreed or disagreed with each other. With something so integral to the fabric of the World Wide Web what are we doing to improve the idea?

Proponents of the “Semantic Web” argue for attaching more metadata to links, using such microformats as XFN to represent social relationships and Geo to specify geographical coordinates. These markup languages may be easily parsed but they serve computers more than humans. The real question may be one of design rather than a solely technical solution — not “what information will we embed in the link?”, but rather “what will it look like?” Currently there are too few visual indicators to convey meaning for hyperlinks, with the most prominent being a color change to denote a page that you’ve already visited. But what other relationships can be represented? There’s a wide range of possibilities — what visual, aural, or tactile tools are at our disposal?

Perhaps we should look less at hyperlinks as the movement between documents, but rather as the documents themselves.