An extract from ‘a brief intorduction to hyperlinks (and why we are not there yet)‘
“There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times 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.”
“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.”
