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Douglas Engelbart's HyperScope 1.0 Launched
ReadWriteWeb writes, "HyperScope 1.0 is a new Web app based on Douglas Engelbart's 1968 NLS/Augment (oNLine System). Engelbart and team have been working on Hyperscope since March of this year in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Its aim is to rebuild portions of Engelbart's NLS, on the Web, using current Web technologies such as Ajax and DHTML. In effect it gives an advanced browsing experience, including classic hypertext features like indirect links and transclusions of remote pieces of other documents. HyperScope has been completely built with open source JavaScript toolkit Dojo — meaning that everything is done on the client-side."
If it takes you 10x longer to design the content and the person viewing the page can find what they want 10x faster then is it really a net gain? (no pun intended) It still is a good way to organize information and beats the crap out of the way some webpage makers do it. It sure would save surfing/researching time but is that a good tradeoff for a massive slowdown in content creation speed because of the page maker having to add all the meta data type stuff?
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
IMHO it seems that this would be a good add-in for community reference materials like wiki's.
Unfortunately the spammers will probably hook into this first... or the 'Web 2.0' crowd.
Community orientation, granular targeting, indirect linking and of course transclusion were all part of the Xanadu vision. How's this different, except for the notable distinction of actually existing?
Actual site: http://hyperscope.org/
Blog blog blog blog blog, blog blogpost blog blog...
For more information, click here.
...it just seems like a hierarchal tree of data. You can expand/contract content to go into more detail. I guess I'm missing the point.
I figured out how to make this super popular! With all these capabilities, they should just take that tiny extra step and have disaster scenarios like a monster slowly eating the info on the page and you have to stop him or a black hole at the bottom of the page sucking up all the text and scrolling you down faster and faster as it grows. That would be cool and would really spice up boring web documents. I think it would even encourage kids to read long research papers more :-)
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
The demo I looked at on the page seemed to be to be an html doc, with the difference being that instead of clicking the words, you would awkwardly click the column to the left to the line in which the thing you want to link resides? I must be missing something cause I don't see how this might be any easier. True I didn't actually read the paper I was clicking through which happened to be on this topic, but how many web pages do I really actually read anyways? A little help?
Suck a lemon?
Version 1.0 conceived in 1968, implemented in 2006. There's home for Duke Nukem Forever then.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I'm surprised that the man who spearheaded the development of the mouse would produce such an unnavigable system; you can't even scroll down with the arrow keys! Of course, in his vision, you're using a mouse and a 5-key chording keyboard; no third hand seems to be available for said arrow keys. But to not enable the scroll wheel, either?! No, thanks...
Isn't this just an anchor tag on drugs? Just make it part of HTML 5.
Have you read my journal today?
Great, now I'll never get to sleep.
First FreeDos 1.0, and now this. If I go to bed now, I'm sure to miss the story I'm really waiting for; just think of it, Babbage's Analytical Engine, completed at last! Will it work the way he thought?
The suspense is killing me.
--MarkusQ
hot damn! browsers really will be a virtual machine.
I give us about 4.9 years until self-aware computers emerge
Why are U.S. taxpayers (via an NSF grant) paying for this?
Ohh wait this IS> /. after all...
Now here's something we hope you'll really like!
Its seems to me that its time for a major shakeup in HTML. While CSS and other things make bold attempts at making the WWW usefull for something other then very basic page display it does seem rather lacking.
Page inclusion based on simple tests! The machinations one has to go through to make what seems like an obvious feature like if(X=Y,this.html,that.html) actualy happen require scripting and all sorts of PHP like occurances, java, javascript and what have you.
CSS gets ever more complex to simply accomplish a text area on the rendered page.
So now the idea HyperScope gets trotted out from a dust filled closet. I can't really see how that is going to help matters rather then just muddy the waters even more.
Isn't it really time for a MAJOR overhaul of HTML and the HTTP protocol? HTML as it was created was sufficient for the basic exchange of information, formatting was limited and things worked fairly well. Microsoft came along and realized that this could be taken MUCH farther and started doing things their own way, which was good for them, not so good for everyone else and was properly derided for doing so in a uncooperative way. But was it really? I agree that MS did what they did out of pure self interest, but did they suggest these things to various committies only to have them shot down because it was MS centric only? I don't know the answer.
I for one think its time to just scratch HTML as it currently exists and scratch CSS right along with it, and come up with something that actualy works smoothly and works as designed!
Basic fundemental layout strategies like Areas, Menus, Images, scrolling, layers and all the primitives sould be part and parsle of an HTML-Like specifcation, not an add-on cludge like CSS. The specification for this should rightly be decided upon by the major browser venders and fully supported by all the web server vendors. It should be code modules written to the specification that are freely available to anyone who wants to link them into their rendering engine. Further more, they should be written in ANSI C and all supporting libraries are included also written in ANSI C.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
:0
;)
As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
Shh.
In 1968 Douglas Engelbart gave a presentation of the NLS/Augment system in San Francisco. It's quite amazing. It uses a three button mouse and pointer (called a bug). It also uses several buttons operated by the non-mouse hand in a chorded fashion to select and copy text.
. html
Video conferencing, group collaboration, the hierarchical presentation and hiding of data, spatial representation of data, hyperlinking are all shown in the demo.
There is a Quicktime of it here: http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/video-68-large
I first saw this in one of my computer science classes at Berkeley; we were all surprised at how much of what we think of as recent technology (last 10 years or so) actually existed in 1968.
NOTE: The video is rather long. The impatient (read: Slashdotters) might want to fast forward through parts.
Typical Slashdot trashing every idea that comes out... while there's no comparsion here, I can't help but be reminded of the original iPod announcement and how it was received: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/ 1816257 : "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
It's a pretty cool research project that brings to life work that was developed nearly 40 years ago, and is at best an early proof of concept of their original work. Take it for what it is rather than jumping on the trash it because you can bandwagon.
Dictionary.com says
"No results found for transclusion. "
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
He gave a talk maybe 10 years ago here in CT, and his presentation was built on a template that essentially had a border of thumbnails around the outside like the ads on a restaurant placemat, starting at 12:00 and proceeding clockwise - each thumbnail either telltaled or swelled (like the OSX dock - can't recall) the cool thing was you had random access to your presentation, and you could jump to any slide from a single screen... you could build it from scratch, but I;m betting it was automated somehow.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Based on approximately 30 seconds clicking through links.
:: outliner : word processor
If so it's not a bad idea. If my impression is correct, then think for a moment about this idea:
hyperscope : wiki
There is no document you can produce in an outliner that cannot be produced in a word processor, whereas there are practically infinite documents you can create in a word processor. Which is what makes an outliner useful. Classification is such a basic and useful mental pattern, putting an amorphous blob of thoughs into the form of an electronic outline goes a lot of the way to organizing it into something coherent.
My experience with wikis is that if you have one really mentally disorganized person with time on his hands, he can quickly turn important parts of the wiki into mush.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I always wanted to link to arbitary points in other people's documents, perhaps to a paragraph containing a particular piece of text. So I guess it would be xpath expressions in links that we need.
Yes, I know.
My post was a test of a new form of communication that we've been trying out over here (called a "joke" or "jest"). It aims to amuse, but at the occasional cost of some technical accuracy.
Hope that helps.
--MarkusQ
Wow, 1968? 38 years from concept to implementation? And idiots were giving the FreeDOS folks a hard time for their release schedule. :)
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
The right thing would be to forget about HTML alltogether and make a distributed platform where the browser IS the virtual machine, programs are lazilly downloaded like web pages and the GUI is a library, rather than a set of specs specified by a commitee.
Simple informational web pages are a subset of an application anyway.
tiddlywiki is better and more powerful through the use of plugins http://www.tiddlywiki.com/
Hi there; I'm the software architect and implementor of HyperScope, and thought I'd provide some more info on the OPML capabilities of what you can do with it.
.d for down and .2n for next two. You can jump through the hierarchy using many of these, including successor (.s) for going to the next sibling of the current node, independent of children; predecessor (.p) for the same, but for the previous sibling; back (.b), which will take you to the previous node that is right before you, independent of hierarchy; next (.n) for the same but forward; up (.u) to move up an ancestor; down (.d) to move down; tail (.t) to move to the last child sibling on my level; head (.h) to move to the first child sibling on my level; and more.
.l (that's a lower case L):
;Important</</>
.l will cause HyperScope to extract
HyperScope is like OPML and HTML hyperlinks on steroids. There are so many different kinds of addressing your nodes that its not even funny. You can do direct addressing using hiearchical placement, even if there are no anchors:
mydoc.opml#2A
Where 2A is the second node (2), followed by it's first child (A). Node numbering always alternates between letters and numbers for readability; so you might have 2A3B. These are generated automatically and will work across all OPML documents, not just ones that have been marked up with the optional HyperScope namespaced attributes.
You can target node IDs, which are unique values that never change for a node even if it is moved around; these always start with a 0:
mydoc.opml#0626
Node IDs are optional, and placed on an OPML outline node using the hs: namespace:
<outline text="foobar" hs:nid="0626"/>
Node IDs are optional, and are created on document creation or editing, while the node hierachical numbers above work for any OPML file.
You can target based on label, using the optional hs:label attribute:
<outline text="foobar" hs:label="mylabel">
This would be the following address:
mydoc.opml#mylabel
Now, here's some cool stuff; once you've hit your target address using direct addressing, you can start to use relative addresses to move relative to the one you just targeted. For example, once I've gone to 'mylabel', I could jump down in the node hierarchy then to the next 2 nodes using the following:
mydoc.opml#mylabel.d2n
Which is
Once you've done these, you can start doing some other fun stuff. I can now do an indirect link, which is
mydoc.opml#mylabel.d2nl
The 'l' is magical; it says: "once you've found the final node after dereferencing the other addresses, look inside the contents of this node, and take the first address you find then follow it."
For example, if the node that lies at mylabel.d2n has the following contents (that's an encoded HTML hyperlink in there):
<outline text='Make sure to see the document: <a href="http://foobar.com/important.opml#2"
then adding that
http://foobar.com/important.opml#2, and follow it and dereference it, which will cause the browser to jump to important.opml, then jump to node #2.
So indirect links let you create a layer of indirection between you and a set of links. You could imagine combining this with the node labels to create a kind of link database; just create a file that you always use that has named nodes for important links that you want to go to, then use indirect links against these. This is exactly what Engelbart does; I've sat and watched him and studied how he uses the system. You can see modern screencasts of that system and his work practices at these blog posts of mine: http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2006/03/new-scr eencast-of-douglas-engelbarts.html and
I suppose this could be done with some sort of JavaScript trickery (a kind of linkTo(URL, RegexKindOfThing)).
It requires some cogitation and a bit of coffee though. A general purpose function for this would indeed be a very nice tool. It should be part of the Dojo toolkit or something like that...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I was thinking of this as requiring an extension to HTML. Doing it using existing JavaScript technology would be tricky as it would mean running JavaScript inside the target page. Even if you find a way to do this, you cannot be sure that someone at Mozilla or Microsoft woun't see it as a security problem and close the hole.
I don't think it would be possible with AJAX unless the target document is on the same server, this is a restriction of XMLHttpRequest. (This where I would like to link to the "Security Alert" near the bottom).
That said, it might be possible to do this using a frameset. You link to a frameset on yout own server with the extra info passed as arguments. The frameset parses the arguments, loads the target page into a frame, then it scans the page for the text and then scrolls the frame.
Alternatively you could serve the target page via your own server inserting an anchor.