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."

Comments

is this really a good idea?

[Desolator144]

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?

Re:is this really a good idea?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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?

Maybe it won't make sense if only a single person is viewing it, but with hundreds, the gain could be very useful. Not just to the readers, but the writer too - if 100 people view the doc and 75% of them are able to understand it better thanks to this, that's much less questions the writer will have to waste time answering.

Re:is this really a good idea?

[RuBLed]

and it seems to be not compatible with Opera [the browser I'm using now] so I tried loading it in IE7 RC1 and only got it to work after around 4 or 5 "permission to run active x controls" (you know, that yellow information toolbar)

So then I browsed the demo, hmmm.. the interface looks fresh and promising, but for compatability reasons, it is much easier (and faster) to browse a document thru html links or by printing them. Although I believe this HyperScope concept (or something similar) is bound to be popular to certain kinds of documents (especially long documents).

but.. I'd miss the 25-page articles with all the subliminal ads. :)

So let me get this straight....

[supasam]

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?

Re:So let me get this straight....

[supasam]

Indeed, it took me a couple (few) clicks to realize that not only was I still on the same page, but that the page I was on wasn't as long as I thought it was. If they'd have demo'ed something huge like the Sams FreeBSD 6 unleashed book (weighing in at about 877 pages including the index) or something like that, maybe there could have been something to it. I don't see this being all that useful to me as of yet.

Moo

[Chacham]

here

For example, every paragraph in a HyperScope document has a location number, an address corresponding to the paragraph's location in a document. For example, the second paragraph in the top-level of a document has the location number 2. To link to this paragraph, you can use the address:

    http://foo/bar.opml#2

To jump directly to the second paragraph while viewing a document, you can click on the Jump button, type 2, and press Apply.

Isn't this just an anchor tag on drugs? Just make it part of HTML 5.

Re:Moo

[Chacham]

I have always found it a bit weak that you have to explicitly put anchors in your document to be able to jump there.

Then get a tool to put the tags in for you. Don't mess with the standard that allows the granularity of actually defining it.

virtual machine

[drDugan]

hot damn! browsers really will be a virtual machine.

I give us about 4.9 years until self-aware computers emerge

The 1968 Demo

[mrdrivel]

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.

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. html

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.

More on HyperScope OPML From The Coder

[BradNeuberg]

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.

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 .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.

Once you've done these, you can start doing some other fun stuff. I can now do an indirect link, which is .l (that's a lower case L):

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: &lt;a href=&quot;http://foobar.com/important.opml#2&quot ;Important&lt;/&lt;/&gt;

then adding that .l will cause HyperScope to extract
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