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?

[Qzukk]

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?

What if two people find what they want 10x faster? (Other than what would really happen: companies would switch from 10 words on an ad-filled page to 5 words each?) There are generally more content consumers than creators, both in the general sense as well as in the case of just about any field.

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. :)

Actual link

[generic-man]

Actual site: http://hyperscope.org/

Blog blog blog blog blog, blog blogpost blog blog...

AHA! caution: massive insight inside

[Desolator144]

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 :-)

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....

[RuBLed]

If I'm right, it is just one file and to put it simply, it is just like reading an html document with the usual anchor tags, where "sections" (div?) appear and disappear as you read the document. If I'm still right, it would create an illusion that you are reading several pages but in reality, you only made that part of the page visible by clicking on the appropriate "links" or "arrows". The article says everything is client-side so I assume the document is all there.

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

[TrappedByMyself]

Yeah, I really don't get it either. The little buttons appear even if there is no useful action to take. If the text is expanded, or whatever its doing, you can still click the little page icon. Doing so, it jumps to some other location, then jumps back to somewhere close to where you were, could be the same line, could be a few lines off. If you hit a few lines off, the technology has successfully disoriented you and has given you no way to get back to where you were before.

I guess if the team's goal was to create something which is even more of a navigation nightmare than Flash, well, then, They're Winner!

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.

There's hope.

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Version 1.0 conceived in 1968, implemented in 2006. There's home for Duke Nukem Forever then.

Re:How does it compare to Xanadu?

[Eideewt]

Existing seems to be HyperScope's big advantage.

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

[Lars Arvestad]

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

I would actually like to see something like this in HTML. I have always found it a bit weak that you have to explicitly put anchors in your document to be able to jump there. Of course, I have not been clever enough to suggest an improvement or even voice my disapproval.

Some way of saying "fifth P element of this document" or "H1 element with text 'The Main Point'" should all be pretty easy to implement for a client program.

Re:Moo

[hey!]

http://foo/bar.opml#2

I think it has to do with how the reference is generated.

OPML is an XML standard for creating outlines. You use your favorite OPML outliner, dump it on the web, and suddenly you have a web version of the outline. OPML was not designed as a web standard; once you put an OPML document on the web, it immediately becomes obvious that every node in the outline ought to have some kind of address you can link to.

I'm not terribly thrilled by this approach, but something like it is necessary. I'd rather extend OPML so that every node has a UUID, as well as an optional human readable idea. That way you could cite the node as http://foo.bar.opml#dbcb7190-3d9b-11db-a98b-080020 0c9a66, even if the author did not think it worthy of a human generated ID. The advantage of this system would be that citations would be stable, even if users reorganize the outline. Which is kind of the point of outlining.

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.

Now I'll never get to sleep

[MarkusQ]

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

Re:Now I'll never get to sleep

[velorg]

Where you been sleeping, man?
That hardware (=crucial, number-crunching part of the Mill) was finally implemented waaaay back in 2000 or thereabouts, and is now on display AND running (crank-powered) in The Science Museum in London, UK. Scientific American had a feature on it around then,too. Sorry, no urls.
Along the way, the two "implementers" discovered several "mechanical" errors in Babbage's original drawings, which would have prevented the Engine from fuctioning even had it been built; so they corrected them, and the concept proved viable after all.

virtual machine

[drDugan]

hot damn! browsers really will be a virtual machine.

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

Enough with the snide remarks....

[FlyingGuy]

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.

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.

Re:Wiki?

[ballermann]

Eugene Kim [1] (why didn't the poster give him credit? It's mostly his work, but I guess Doug is just a tid bit more popular) presented the system at WikiSym2006 [2] and did indeed show how to integrate this as additional view into a Wiki (I think he used his PurpleWiki [3])

[1] http://www.eekim.com/blog/
[2] http://wikisym.org/ws2006/
[3] http://www.blueoxen.com/tools/purplewiki/

It appears to be a web based outliner

[hey!]

Based on approximately 30 seconds clicking through links.

If so it's not a bad idea. If my impression is correct, then think for a moment about this idea:

        hyperscope : wiki :: outliner : word processor

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.

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