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It is very noticable that this article is much more about MEMEX than about hyperlinks? Can someone add stuff on hypertexts themselves? Bit strange having html as a "see also"? -- (talk to) BozMo 10:31, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
Most of what is here really should become a separate article about Memex since Memex is much more than an early form of electromechanical-microfilm hypertext concept. And there should also be a separate article on hypertext where there would only be a few lines and a link to the Memex article, within a history of the conceptual ancestors of "real" hypertext. But I am not going to write it since my domain of knowledge is the Office of the future (and how it was viewed in the past), and I am afraid I would goof up an hypertext article. AlainV 02:31, 2004 May 24 (UTC)
While it may be true in today's common usage to say that "a hypertext system is one for displaying information that contains references (called hyperlinks) to other information on the system," this is certainly not true historically. This, instead, is the limited sense of "hypertext" popularized by applications such as HyperCard, Storyspace, and the World Wide Web -- media organized as relatively-discrete nodes connected by (perhaps dynamic) links.
This definition was not that employed either at the term's coinage (by Theodor Holm Nelson) or by early pioneers of hypertext systems (such as Douglas Engelbart). Nelson defined hypertext as a subset of "hypermedia" (media that "branch or perform on request") and gave both link-based ("discrete hypertext") and level of detail-based ("stretchtext") examples. (The term was defined in 1965, in "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate." The examples were given in 1970, in "No More Teachers' Dirty Looks.") Engelbart used the term "hypertext" to refer to all the new document capabilities enabled by the fine-grained addressing of his oN-Line System (NLS). These included linking, but also dynamically-created views at mixed levels of detail, other new modes of navigation, and so on. (See, for example, Engelbart's "mother of all demos" in 1968.)
For more on the Nelson part of this history, see my short paper on the subject: What Hypertext Is (ACM Hypertext 2004).
It seems odd to me that the HyperText Transport Protocol is not mentioned in the article. I feel that a protocol designed to facilitate networked hypertext systems would be worthy of at least a link. Anyone disagree? - mjb 22:00, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
obviously there owuld need to be passwords or some kind of identy verification depending on which page you were editing.
Tim Sheridan sparky@navpoint.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.94.233.174 ( talk) 15:15, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
The article mentions Wikimedia (the foundation). In this context, shouldn't that be MediaWiki (the software) instead? -- Steven Fisher 06:36, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
``Guide was the first hypertext system for personal computers, but was not very successful.``
What is meant by "successful" in the above quote? You see "the first hypertext system for personal computers" is in effect equivalent to the Memex for personal use as dreamed by the visionary Vannevar Bush in 1945. Arguably, his dream had come true through Guide forty years later at last! So granted, it ought to be mentioned at least WHO on earth developed that damn stuff. You know what I mean, I hope. -- KYPark 15:50, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Last year, OWL [...] startled the hypertext community by creating a program that contained neither data nor hypertext links, but only an empty screen and the tools to create a hypertext environment. In bringing out Guide, it was as if OWL had published a book with a blank pages and thoughtfully included a pen.
Where established hypertext producers [...] supply both data and links, OWL decided to approach the other way around. Guide provides no set text to work from; data are user-supplied, as are the hypertext links. Using Guide is as close as you're likely to get to do-it-yourself hypertext.
Suppose you are writing with Guide's word processor and want to add a comment [hidden from] the text itself. Using [...] a "button," you key onto a word in the text to create a hypertext link to a blank screen; you write the comment there. When you finish the note, you return to the main screen and proceed with the next.
Suppose further that after storing the completed text to disk in Guide format, you start another, unrelated document. If If you decide [...] to establish a relationship between the two documents, you can create a hypertext link usig the tools provided in Guide. That link will give full access to both documents -- from either file.
While it certainly isn't hypermedia, neither is Guide limited to mere text, Charts, drawings, and even photos can be inserted into Guide files [...].
Among the many applications offered by Guide are outline processing, word processing, desktop publishing, free-form data bases, and educational training aids. The program's graphics capabilities even enable the user to create slide shows on screen, with pictures that take their cue from path established in the hypertext environment. The user may wander at will among the various screens, keying onto topics [...] of interest, bypassing those that are not.
While Guide incorporates many of the functions of the earlier large-scale hypertext systems, it is geared more toward the individual [...]. It could turn out to be a single-user version of Xanadu. -- TJB [my boldface]
-- Guide: Do-It-Yourself Hypertext? [a special column singly highlighted in:] T. J. Byers, Built by Association, PC World, April 1987 (Special Report: CD ROM Goes to Work), 5(4), 244-251. [This surprising article is one of References of Hypertext. -- KYPark 08:10, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
[Panasonic OWL] developed "Guide", the world's first hypertext authoring system (predating the Web). [...].
It wasn't the first, but I remember when it came out, and they were making that claim back then, too, and never backed down from it. Here's a history that includes Owl (but not as the first): http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~wwwbtb/book/chap1/htx_hist.html [broken]
Owl is credited in Tim Berners-Lee's book, "Weaving the Web". Tim approached them about modifying Guide to support the internet work he was thinking of, but it seems no-one there was interested. [my boldface]
-- http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PanasonicOwl -- KYPark 08:10, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Actually, the company was known as Office Workstations Limited before the European part became Panasonic OWL and the American part became InfoAccess (which was taken over by Stellent during the dot-com collapse). Also, Guide was initially created by Peter Brown, an academic, and then licensed by his university to OWL. I have his original paper about the original version of Guide lying around here somewhere. And yes, I have seen those fascinating issues of PC World from 1987 on microfilm.
It's important to look at the big picture and try to avoid writing Whiggish history. If you don't know why "Whiggish" is a bad word among historians (it's actually almost an insult when one accuses another of writing in that style), you have a lot of reading to do.
Getting back to my point, the fact that Guide did have some revolutionary features for its time (in the sense that OWL was the first to implement those features on the PC) still doesn't change the fact that it was always a niche product (in comparison to the mainstream apps of the mid-1980s like WordPerfect and Ventura Publisher). Of course, so was HyperCard, initially --- although HyperCard at least got a lot more attention and mindshare.
When you're researching computer history, it's important to look at not only the articles surrounding the release of a new product (which are often full of hype and lack the perspective that comes only with experience), but also the articles 3 or 5 or 7 years later to see whether the product flourished or died in the market. Try looking at articles on Guide from 1990 or 1992 or 1994 and see where Guide was then (I have). By 1993 it was just another high-end expensive electronic publishing product being paraded around at trade shows along with 10 other major competitors (along with Folio Views and eBT), while HyperCard had won the hearts of the PC masses.
-- Coolcaesar 23:28, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Prof. Peter Brown (retired a few years ago) worked at the University of Kent, England, together with his wife Prof. Heather Brown, expert in the Office Document Architecture (ODA), de facto European standard competing with the American SGML. Berners-Lee may have been swinging between ODA and SGML. At least he knew much about the couple, including their interests.
That is to say, anyway, it seems (to me at least) that the history of hypertext used to be described overwhelmingly along the American paradigm. Simply this may be unfair if not untrue, mere "local effect," and violate NPOV! There may be another hidden European, especially British, paradigm or thread as well. A radical American conservatism or nationalism appears overriding and shadowing the hypertext landscape in reality.
Note that in the beginning few mentioned Herbert Wells, and now some mention even Paul Otlet, both still rather negatively, while the contemporary Vannevar Bush always positively. All were dreamers whose influence defies an easy objective evaluation. The truth is yet to come. Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson may have been affected by Otlet and Wells much more than Bush, though no reference was made to them. Furthermore, we may better start from James Joyce and T. S. Eliot in the 1920s to know well why hypertext. Be advised that I am working hard preparing myself to show it up. Perhaps I would start like this:
``From the early 20th century, the idea of hypertext was eloquently and repeatedly motivated by "selection" of the right information from the messy mass publication rather than by publication to add up to such a mass...``
Let me make it simple and ask you why it is so hesitating to add some of the essential 6W's in describing history properly. The short passage I quoted in the beginning was below the minimum essential, I fear. Such a passage missing some 6W's is likely quite misleading as well as incomplete in itself, to be sure. To know Guide was one year earlier than HyperCard free of charge is to know it would be hard to compete after all even at a reasonable price. Such is exactly the case between Navigator and Internet Explorer. The strong eat the weak. This is the market! So I am so sorry though a copyleftist loving freewares and Richard Stallman. I love to see ideas rather than prices compete fair so that the weak but creative can survive.
In response to my suggestion to do Guide some 6W kinda favor, you have made it a little longer but done it more harm, I fear again. -- KYPark 16:27, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have no idea where you are going with your rambling and ungrammatical English. What do you mean by "6W's?" If you're talking about who, where, when, what, etc., you really need to do some reading about basic historiography---which is so much more than that.
Anyway, I do know about ODA, and the short-lived HyperODA project. I also know why ODA failed---because it was based on ASN.1. And yes, I do have multiple sources on file discussing ASN.1's failings in detail, including the NSF study from 1991 or 1992. There was also a project that attempted to implement ODA on top of SGML but that went nowhere.
The fact is, whether you like it or not, Engelbart and Nelson were not influenced by Otlet because they did not know about him. Engelbart has never mentioned Wells, though in his important 1962 paper he was careful to cite both Whorf and Bush. I think Nelson may have mentioned Wells somewhere in those rambling pigpens of paper he calls "books", but I'm not sure.
As for Bush, I vaguely recall that there has been a lot of speculation in the academic journals about whether Bush knew of Otlet's work, but no one has turned up any solid proof. A lot of people have pointed out, though, including Bush's biographer, G. Pascal Zachary, that Bush was an engineer by training. He despised the humanities and never talked to librarians (even though they could have helped him refine his ideas about the memex), so it is unlikely he would have gotten along with a lawyer-turned-proto-information-scientist like Otlet.
If you're trying to get at whether there was an alternate non-American hypertext research project (apart from the Web, of course, which soon became an American project when Berners-Lee moved to the U.S.), there's always videotex. If you look at some of the academic studies of videotex from the early 1980s, they encountered many of the problems in content structure that were later encountered in the mid-1990s by early Web site developers. The link maps often used by Web site developers to organize Web sites in development actually originated back then with the early videotex systems.
-- Coolcaesar 18:30, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Redikillus! Don't bother where I am going with my rambling and ungrammatical English. Simply regard 6W as a symbol of my invention if not convention, and as a matter of vocabulary rather than grammar. And please let me know how to say something better than I said disgusting you. But you don't have to discourage me from telling the hidden truth to undermine and deconstruct the local effect or alleged "Legacy" From Memex to Hypertext that you suggested to me at first.
Coolcaesar, you are too honest to deny that you are too patriotic to affirm neutrally what foreigners have done so well, I guess. So you look so jealous. I have no idea either where you are going with your rambling and unreasonable chauvinistic nationalism plus exclusivism comparable with Nazism. It was when the frantic Nazism was at its height that H. G. Wells proposed the ideas of World Encyclopedia and World Brain as a solution to the World Problem for the World Peace. He was struggling against evil nationalism and professionalism.
You would know that Wells has been well known all over the world, and far more influential than Otlet especially in the Anglo-American scene. But you might not know that both communicated with each other! So whose idea is original is rather obscure. Then the next question worthy of asking would be whether Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, and Berners-Lee, for example, were influenced by Wells regardless of Otlet in relation to the Web and hypertext. Obviously, you as well as all of them are not well prepared so far to answer this question.
Nevertheless, suppose they were unaware of the ideas of World Brain and World Encyclopedia based on the "world-wide network" as his ambitious and eloquent solution to the "World Problems" for the "World Peace." Then they suffer too painful lack of the right information for a well-done claim. On the other hand, suppose they were aware of it. Then they appear to suffer so deplorable lack of scientist and scholarly morality that they may well be suspected of intellectual piracy. The similarity and disparity between his (as well as Otlet's) and their ideas will turn out sooner or later.
Meanwhile, a striking parallelity may be noteworthy in terms of well-known British/less-known Belgian, between Wells/Otlet and Berners-Lee/Cailliau, known as the co-inventors of the World Wide Web, which looks like rewording of "world-wide network" as coined by Wells. Rewording is rewarding more often than not!
Let me tell you one more thing. As far as I know, Michael Lesk was the first computer/information scientist who accepted Wells as one of the pioneers in the Web and hypertext development, and W. B. Rayward was the first library/information scientist who claimed both Otlet and Wells as such. Coincidentally Lesk (American) and Rayward (Australian) stayed at University College London as a visiting professor. -- KYPark 17:19, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have no idea where you are going with this. Your incoherent reasoning is full of fallacies, speculation, and non sequiturs. For example, "rewording is rewarding" is the kind of childish inference that has been unfashionable ever since most intellectuals came to accept the general axiom that correlation does not equal causation. Correlation may support a "hunch" that starts a separate investigation into causation, but causation must always be separately proved. You have no understanding of even the essentials of logic.
To restate the point more bluntly, you are making the kind of bizarre inferences which are characteristic of the ramblings of schizophrenics (and yes, I have read extensively about them). I strongly advise you to seek medical assistance immediately. -- Coolcaesar 17:57, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
``I have no idea where you are going with this. Your incoherent reasoning is full of fallacies, speculation, and non sequiturs ... childish inference ... no understanding of even the essentials of logic ... bizarre inferences ... ramblings of schizophrenics ... I strongly advise you to seek medical assistance immediately.`` [AZ]
I should say, "AFTER YOU!"
I really mean it now beyond reasonable doubt. From the very beginning I have dared to guess or infer from your words that you are highly symptomatic of radical American nationalsim plus exclusivism such that you are too radical for NPOV! As you neither deny nor affirm it, it appears evident now that this should be the place for you AFTER YOU "seek medical assistance" as borrowed from your words. I believe that this should not remain the place for evil nationalist and professionalist brainwashing propaganda but neutral brainstorming discussion.
Instead of either denying or affirming proudly that you are such a radical, you have ridiculously offended me again and again. Yet it would be not too late for you to clear or give it up rather than shy away. I wish you to be a man of courage or virtus in ancient Greek.
You confuse designative or descriptive reference to something with argumentative or prescriptive inference from something. In contrast to right or wrong prescriptive inference, descriptive reference is either true or false such that the World Wide Web looks like rewording of "world-wide network," and that rewording is rewarding more often than not. And these references were suggested as likelihood rather than certainty. It is not a fallacy that "rewarding is rewarding." It describes or refers to a common reality of plagiarism where rewording is cause and rewarding is effect.
Meanwhile, I offered little inference of my own, though some may be implied between the lines in context. Nevertheless it is evil of you to blame me for "incoherent reasoning...full of fallacies, speculation, and non sequiturs." For I am not really responsible for such implications that you may unlimitedly infer (deduce/induce/abduce) at will from my explicit references. You could blame me if my references were false. Instead, however, you argue wrong as if I explicitly dictated a lot of wrong inference, most likely because my references clash with your radical black and white mindset, don't you?
This encyclopedia as well as the underlying World Wide Web, based on extensible nature of hypertext, is destined to contribute to global beyond local utilitarianism on the one hand, and to user-centrism on the other. In retropect there have been two mainstreams of hypertext development, namely, open integral utilitarianism and secret fragmentary commercialism which have been inherited to date. The former may be traced back to H. G. Wells and Vannevar Bush and roughly marked by the earlier stage of development, while the latter traced back to Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson and so marked by the later stage. Then the open, integral, non-commerical, user-centric, utilitarian WWW emerged overshadowing fragmentary commercialism.
That is to say, short-sighted, narrow-minded, commercial, dull and lazy men came in late (See: Hypertext '87 keynote address) to make it their own creativity and profession under the banner of hypertext that sounds a misnomer (See: Text retrieval section below). You are supposed to be one of them. See "the big picture" as borrowed from your words, that is, what hypertext is all about!
Anyway, it is up to Wikipedia readers all around the world, to judge which one is the loser of this game symptomatic of KO, while the other the winner of OK, though it is almost self-evident from our past experiences as well as this very context. -- KYPark 16:12, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
Please answer the above question in a word. I cordially ask:
Wikipedia is a great surprise or mutation that has sprung from the largest market where extreme commercialism and capitalism were dominating, where they definitely deferred something utilitarian like the French CNRS and the Russian VINITI, and preferred fragmentary for-profit information analysis centers that sooner or later failed in making profit enough for survival. Refer to the Roman Pucinski's proposal for a National Research Data Processing and Information Retrieval Center, the Arthur D. Little's counter-proposal, "Do not support large-scale centralization of mechanized document retrieval facilities...", and the Mansfield Amendment of 1973 that seriously affected Engelbart.
The utilitarian World Wide Web originated from the EU, allegedly if not practically independent from the US, and decisively conquered most of the fragmentary hypertext territory. It meant a completely new orientation and motivation for the next hypertext applications. Other utilitarian ones have evolved from the Web, including Google, CiteSeer, and Wikipedia. The impact appears to be much more devastating than the Sputnik in which case such apologism that space science and technology had been "a primarily American phenomenon" must not have been terribly convincing.
Hypertext looks like something better than nothing until the advent of CD-ROM, which was soon followed by the user-centric Guide and then HyperCard. Where there is digital text, there is hypertext however primitive. There is little surprise indeed. -- KYPark 17:38, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
>
Again, your odd analysis is unconvincing, because your grasp on the basic facts is so poor. Many for-profit information services were already thriving by 1989, including Westlaw and LexisNexis. Also, even in 1989, American consumers were already being bombarded with advertisements for America Online and CompuServe. Plus there were the videotex experiments of the early 1980s like Viewtron.
CERN is located in Switzerland, which is not part of the European Union. Although it's true that CERN was the birthplace of the Web and the first Web design firm and Web directory were started by CERN employees, most of the other subsequent "firsts" occurred in the U.S., including the first newspaper to regularly publish to the Web (the Palo Alto Weekly), and the first college with a Web site (Honolulu Community College).
Also, by grouping Google with two nonprofit operations, Citeseer and Wikipedia, you seem to have forgotten that Google is a commercial, public for-profit corporation that just launched its IPO last year. Although its founders claim to be guided by the rule "Don't do evil," they are ultimately bound to act in the best interest of the shareholders like the officers of any other corporation.
At this point, I think I am inclined to give up this debate for now, because it is clear we cannot agree on any salient points. While I have enjoyed debating the history of hypertext with you, I do not think we will be reaching any agreement in the near future, and there are other areas of Wikipedia which I would prefer to focus on at this time. Perhaps when some other third party joins this debate then I will jump back in. -- Coolcaesar 07:52, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
I did not pretend a bird's-eye view on American information services, but simply focus on the fact that the American scientific information policy after the Sputnik shock preferred for-profit decentralization marked by information analysis centers to non-profit centralization. Westlaw and LexisNexis are out of scientific context. America Online and CompuServe are Internet Service Providers rather than information services proper, not to mention information analysis centers.
On the other hand, the Internet or the earlier is a non-profit centralization and outcome from that shock. Originally, however, it was designed as information infrastructure only for advanced research. For many years at first, it was mostly used for e-mails. Then the Gopher emerged as a true information service only to be overshadowed upon advent of the Web, which in addition soon drove the Internet open to the public. The Web based on hypertext has undermined and determined even the fate of the underlying Internet up to utilitarianism.
The primary feature of the Web in origin was as simple as to click on the reference number (or the keyword) in context to retrieve the so-referenced document on screen. Many people had spoken of hypertext, but few had thought of the vitality of reference numbers and nearby keywords in context as "associative trails" everywhere in sientific literature. -- KYPark 17:45, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
Coolcaesar, you did tell the truth that "CERN is located in Switzerland, which is not part of the European Union." Nevertheless, while I was so careless in mistaking, you look so careful in misleading or suggesting as if CERN located in Switzerland were owned or run by her rather than by a number of European member countries, most of which are also the EU member countries.
You know the idea and creation of the Web used to be credited to one man, Sir Berners-Lee, rather than the CERN teamwork, though rather unusually. Then, my passage "The utilitarian World Wide Web originated from the EU..." is not too bad.
While the status and role of CERN is tricky anyway, what exactly do you mean by that hypersensitive passage otherwise than to try to upset the overall credibility of my words using my marginal mistakes? You are supposed to be so cunning and misleading, showing up your evil Machiavellism. -- KYPark 17:24, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
Text retrieval (TR) is simply cross-reference (XR) from text to text, hence hypertext (XT). That is, the ideas of TR, XR, XT, and the like largely overlap and closely resemble one another. XR splits into XR in context (XRIC) and XR out of context (XROC) in close analogy to KWIC and KWOC long ago, respectively. The narrow or common sense of hypertext implies XRIC, while the wide or true sense includes XROC as well. From the text retrieval point of view, hypertext as a new retrieval paradigm, objecting to XROC or subjecting itself mainly to XRIC, sounds like a self-defeating misnomer, because text retrieval and cross-reference well comprise both XROC and XRIC in themselves. Hypertext was coined in 1965 by Ted Nelson who used to object to the wide spectrum of text retrieval or cross-reference and subject it mainly to the narrow idea of transclusion, or simply quotation, aiming for text patchwork rather than retrieval. -- KYPark 16:12, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
I am created as equal as Ted Nelson (as well as C. S. Peirce) who used to dictate notoriously his own terminological invention beyond well-established convention, including hypertext, transclusion, docuverse, literary machine, and so on. Words are not given by God but invented by man one after another to add up to the millenia old convention. The English vocabulary is supposed to count 800 thousand -- a redundancy (from the Basic English perspective) of almost a hundred times the Basic English! So in principle I object to invention of new words as well as use of unusual ones.
Simply I split cross-reference (XR) as the key to text retrieval into XRIC and XROC with respect to context, triggered internally or externally, on the fly or behind the curtain, if you like. I may be the first to note such a dichotomy of text retrieval including hypertext. XRIC and XROC are mere shorthands so that you need not take them seriously but the ideas and perhaps words for which they stand as extension or refinement of KWIC and KWOC confined within document titles. Cross-references or hyperlinks do not necessarily fall on keywords but also on reference numbers and icons, for example. Thus the classic but crude ideas of KWIC and KWOC need to be extended or refined so as to be general enough. -- KYPark 17:47, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
-- KYPark 19:29, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
The content added from the ON reference remains in this article, but the reference has been removed. This action is disputed and a conversation is ongoing here. Uriah923 06:32, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
No Mention of BT's failed attempt to claim a prior patent on hyperlinks. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/23/bt_loses_hypertext_claim/
We can to diferenciating betwen hypertex(literature) and hypertex, becauste is diferent. -- 199.26.12.5 15:20, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
If you mean hypertext as literature and hypertext as technology, you are right that they are different concepts, but I see no point in creating a new article because they are tightly interrelated. -- Coolcaesar 23:28, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
The recent TabTalk addition is interesting and seems worth citing. But I think it would be better if moved to a separate TabTalk page to receive the current multi-paragraph description, along with a link in addition to the patent reference to support "No original research" criteria.
Then collapse the multi-paragraph TabTalk discussion to a sentence interleaved with the other synopsis of notable hypertext systems. Grlloyd 11:19, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
I just cleaned the article up quite a bit, putting the information under appropriate headings and in a more readable, prose-like form. I tried not to lose or change information, however, I would not be surprised if this did happen during the process. Feel free to adjust this as necessary. My biggest problem was coming up with an easily-understandable, concise definition of the title term in the intro. Wrad 23:57, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, Wrad, judging from what happenend over the past week, it looks like Jstanley and then your own well-intentioned edits have created a vague, ambiguous, incomprehensible, and inaccurate mess which is actually much worse than what was there before. The longstanding definition, which I drafted back in 2004, looked like this: [3] Over time, various people kept fooling around with it and it got worse and worse until Jstanley really screwed it up on 12 April (I think he is a nonnative English speaker).
Anyway, to be specific, Wrad, about the issues I have with the current version:
I think we should go back to my old definition. What do other people think?-- Coolcaesar 06:46, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I can see your point with #1, and as I said this particular sentence worried me. I would appreciate your help. The fifth sentence, though is actually pretty much exactly the same as before, we can't really "go back" on it. Other than that, the problems you mention are rather small punctuation and grammar problems, easily fixed. I think that your reading of the paragraph is a bit over-negative here. The fact is, it was pretty bad before. I don't think going back is the answer. This article has had a cleanup tag on it for about 5 months. Somebody needed to clean it up.
The problem with the old version was that it was broken up into four or five different paragraphs. It was also full of jargon and a bit wordy, I thought. I know what hypertext is, and I couldn't understand the old definition. Imagine what someone who didn't know would have thought on reading it.
Also, could you please watch your tone when proofreading? I don't think your naming names is appropriate, especially as your argument for their edits being "a vague, ambiguous, incomprehensible, and inaccurate mess which is actually much worse than what was there before" is extremely debatable given the sad state the article was in before their changes. Wrad 13:05, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I made some adjustments as per your suggestions. I believe it is much better now. Wrad 14:23, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I've got a question. The reference style in this article seems pretty varied. It starts with a parenthetical style in the intro, then moves to web links (which I changed to refs for the time being. No other parenthetical in-line citation exist in the article, but there is a nice list of references at the bottom. How can we make this more uniform? Wrad 21:40, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Another problem: the "Invention of Hypertext" and "Applications" sections are really jumbled, even after some attempts to make them more chronological. Can anyone take a look at these and make them more comprehensible? Wrad 23:29, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree with your cleanup work, and made a copyedit pass on "Early precursors" and "Memex" sections. The "Applications" section should probably be renamed "Hypertext before the Web" and link to Timeline of hypertext technology for context when it is copyedited. I'll take a crack at it over the next day or so unless someone else wishes to do so. -- Grlloyd 23:14, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I just removed the cleanup tag as the major problems seem to have been dealt with. Wrad 23:25, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, the article as it now stands still has several problems, which indicate to me that you are not familiar with any of the technical literature on this subject (I have 25 binders of information on hypertext on file, but I am not posting any citations to that material on Wikipedia since I am reserving that for a planned book).
Here are the current problems:
I highly recommend taking a course on the history of computing if you can find one in your area. -- Coolcaesar 07:50, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Kindly refrain from personal attacks. Thank you. If you see errors, improve the article, rather than reverting edits or posting every last one of my mistakes here. Everyone makes them, so please be kind. Cleanup ain't easy, and somebody's foot always gets stepped on. Wrad 14:54, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, I just came back and looked over your suggestions. The first one, I think is fine, so I didn't change it. I make it pretty clear in the first sentence that 'clicking' is its most common form, not a comprehensive thing. Linking, cross-referencing I changed. I kept user interfacing because I've read it in plenty of places, so I don't really see a problem. The Mendel thing wasn't very well explained in the old version. I understand it better now that you've elaborated, but I don't know where it would fit or how important it actually is. Isn't it enough to say that work was duplicated? I changed gopher protocol. Wrad 02:55, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
In the spirit of the ongoing cleanup, I removed the qualification that complex hypertexts can be developed "with a computer network like the internet". Many complex hypertexts are not networked. In practice, the hypertextuality of Web hypertext has been often been limited (see Les Carr's HT04 paper), while stand-alone hypertexts like afternoon or The Victorian Web are richly linked. MarkBernstein 16:49, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
Mark, the longstanding passage I had originally drafted (before it was mangled this month) was: "The documents and applications can be local or can come from anywhere with the assistance of a computer network like the Internet." Somehow in the past month, it fell apart into the inaccurate sentence that you just fixed. Turning to Wrad's latest revisions, here is my newest critique:
I'm just going to speak my mind here. The problems you see in your latest post would be best fixed by . . . you! If you want to change these little things, do it. Don't try to work through me. Even if I am convinced of what you say, as I am in many things, if I change it you'll see something else wrong with what I did and tell me I need to do more research (don't we all?). It would take you less than ten minutes to make these changes, whereas it has taken you weeks to try to get me to do it. Wrad 20:46, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Coolcaesar: You used 171 words worth of bandwidth on this page, holding forth about the article's anachronistic use of the term "user interfacing." I fixed the problem by deleting three characters and inserting two. Pues ¡Ya no me chingas! ô¿ô 00:41, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
I posted set of edits to this article as well as memex to provide more specific quotes and conclusions from Michael Buckland's published research on electronic documentation retrieval and Bush's Memex. One edit replaced a "The Memex" section statement that Goldberg invented a Memex-like device with short paragraph in "Early Precursors" section which I tried to craft as a fair but short summary of Buckland's research. See also the "Criticism" section of memex. -- Grlloyd 03:51, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
I added a bad paragraph, but then I did find the original source material. Reference to Buckland's criticism is valuable, but as originally presented, it was so out of context as to confuse the uninitiated more than enlighten. Just the omission of the date got me going, as 1992 is to a criticism of hypertext as 1450 is to a criticism of popular literacy.
5. "Associative trails." Bush had a low opinion of indexes and classification schemes:
"Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to use rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path." (Bush, 1945a, 106).
This account shows no awareness of the ability of indexing and classification systems to bring related material together through collocation and syndetic structure and indicates that Bush's understanding of information retrieval was severely incomplete. Bush declared, in effect, that retrieval should not function as conventional indexes do but as the human brain does, i.e. "as we may think." Bush thought that the creation of arbitrary associations between individual records was the basis of memory, so he wanted a "mem(ory-)ex", or "Memex instead of index." The result was a personalized, but superficial and inherently self-defeating design. Instead of indexing documents directly by their contents or characteristics, Bush proposed coding documents by their perceived relevance to some theme, such as the superiority of the short Turkish bow during the crusades. Documents perceived as relevant to the same theme were thereby linked to each other by a common coding, which provided a "trail" through the collection of documents. In effect, however, each trail is an indexing concept and the code for each trail is, in effect, an indexing term.
Relevance judgements, however, are notoriously inconsistent, situational, and likely to change as one's knowledge evolves. Since Bush's trails were based, not on the contents of the document but on perceived relevance of documents to trails, any individual's pattern of trails would be unlikely to be satisfactory for any other user. A personalized information system may be advantageous for an individual but has limited usefulness for others. Furthermore, perceptions of relevance are less stable than perceptions of subject content. For this reason conventional subject-based indexing remains tolerable, indeed preferable, in practice, because a system based directly on relevance, as in the Memex, could not change itself automatically to reflect continuously changing perceptions of relevance. The trails, being based on one individual's personal knowledge and perceptions of relevance, would be highly obsolescent. As a user's knowledge increased, perceptions of relevance would change, and the trails would need to be remade. Any given pattern of trails would remain appropriate only so long as the user did not learn anything from the use of the Memex--or in any other way.
I find that to be a rather large departure from the original quote. To my mind Bush is not directing his remark toward the ontology of information retrieval. It's rather a narrow remark about mechanical felicity. He begins by pointing out, in imprecise language, the artificiality of all collocation schemes. He is definitely beginning from the premise that index must exist relative to a (necessarily artificial) collocation order which defines the document retrieval path.
This is true up to a point. However, in electronic retrieval systems, the collocation order is now regarded as a low-level implementation detail. When a web server translates a URL path to a document path (if the file is served somewhat literally), most of the collocation takes place in the directory index structures implicit to the file system. URLs are regarded as distributed and hierarchical and not thought of as collocations at all.
I didn't immediately comprehend why Bush did not simply put forward that every document is simply granted a unique number (or hierarchical tupple) on inclusion to the information system. It is easy to accomplish this *within* a spool of microfilm. He seems to be thinking about problems associated with the interchange of spools. Well, you would need to duplicate a DNS-like system with a hierarchical numbering authority to ensure non-conflict. Does an index cover all the spools you might have or not have? That's a significant practical problem.
Nevertheless, I don't see the quote introduced by Buckland as reflecting on Bush's grasp of information retrieval in general. Bush is griping about an annoying practical problem which has subsequently been dealt with in the DNS/URL space. You have to have some system of reference in place to establish any kind of link from one document to another, or a position in another. It matters not whether you favour trails over indices. Bush's comment strikes me a gripe about the cumbersome nature of reference in general within the guise of a rigid collocation system.
The emergence of crowd-sourcing and folksonomies (ick, ick) challenge Buckland's assertions about "relevance judgements being notoriously inconsistent". Within the notorious inconsistency, (quasi) useful patterns nevertheless emerge. Here I think it is Buckland falling short of envisioning the automation required to extract those patterns on a practical basis, or the possibility of emergent categories as experienced on the Wikipedia.
I haven't studied the Bush material itself. How well did he manage to differentiate the mechanical issue of naming systems (potentially distributed) and document reference from his envisioned information structures within that system? I don't find Buckland's criticism particularly illuminating, but it does point the way to some important questions. I should point out my own bias that conceptual innovators tend to find themselves oscillating between theoretical modes of perception and pragmatic modes of perception, not yet being able to properly differentiate quite where the line belongs. It becomes much easier in retrospect to differentiate collocation orders from hierarchical naming systems. MaxEnt 01:27, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
Recent pruning of the external links to Hypertext Fiction included removing links to Eastgate_Systems. I think that's wrong. I'm an employee of Eastgate, but I'm also past program chair of the Hypertext Conference (twice), and I'm program chair of WikiSym 2008, and in this context I'd appreciate extension of assumption of good faith to this discussion. Eastgate has been publishing hypertext fiction since 1990, and its catalog includes the majority of titles discussed in books about literary hypertext, taught in courses on hypertext fiction, and examined in conferences and monographs. I'd prefer links to specific works of hypertext fiction in this place, but understand the desire for a concise list. Concision means trimming the list as much as possible, but not more. (I'd prefer to discuss this by email bernstein@eastgate.com if discussion is necessary) 18:44, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm fairly well acquainted with the new media literature its history, but I'm skeptical of the "Tutor-Tech's" claim to be the first hypermedia authoring tool. It was not part of Hypertext '87. I don't believe it was cited in Conklin's 1986 review article. It has not been widely discussed in histories of hypertext if, in fact, it has been discussed at all. The claim to priority is especially doubtful, since HES, FRESS, NLS/AUGMENT, and perhaps early versions of TIES and NOTECARDS were earlier. Broadly speaking, I think PLATO might be considered a sort of early hypertext tool.
For the present, I propose to edit the entry simply to remove the mistaken claim to priority. I think the best course for the poster, assuming he or she knows about Tutor-Tech, might be to write a short paper on the system and its contributions and publish it in the ACM Hypertext Conference or, perhaps, in a history of science conference, and then to come back and amend the encyclopedic history to incorporate it. MarkBernstein ( talk) 13:36, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
Miichael Iantosca recently added the following reference to the history section:
While this is not necessarily out of place, does this particular system merit inclusion here? The other systems described in this section, for better or worse, all had either widespread influence or attained a vast audience. BookManager didn't. Almost everything mentioned here post-1987 had a flagship paper at the ACM Hypertext Conference. I don't recall that BookManager did, though I might be confounding it with Bell Labs' Superbook. I don't recall hearing a paper on this, for example, at the 1992 European Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia in Milano. A number of other hypertext systems of this era are not mentioned here either -- PLATO, Microcosm, NoteCards, HAM, Ntergaid, Hyperties, Aquanet, HyperSet, Scripted Paths, Trellis, Gateway, and Symbolics Document Examiner spring to mind, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some very famous and influential papers here.
So, rather than adding an isolated system (though no doubt a very fine one), perhaps we should add a review of early hypertext systems? MarkBernstein ( talk) 14:13, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
Just for the record, this is a fully verifiable invention disclosure - possibly the earliest formally on file with the US Patent Office (cited) documenting prior art on the expansion of hypertext to hypermedia electronic books and book browsers using hypertext embedded media players. The disclosure was made public and published in IBM's widely distributed IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Volume 35 Number 2 prior the emergence of the first web browser. That journal was widely read - far more so than papers presented at technical conferences of the day. Before there was a web, BookManager – based on IBM’s GML – the precursor to IBM’s invention of SGML - was the by far the most prominent electronic book browser deployed worldwide with massive electronic libraries for I/T shops; it was used heavily in every large and mid-range IT shop worldwide. In fact, BookManager is still in use today in virtually every large IBM large systems (z/OS) shops worldwide. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
MikeIantosca (
talk •
contribs) 23:24, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
If presentation of a paper at a conference is a required criteria for accurate historical recognition of a formally filed, widely published and widely read invention disclosure, then you’ll need to disqualify far more than this entry. I contend history should reflect fact, not only what is popular and newsworthy. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
MikeIantosca (
talk •
contribs) 23:50, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
A few more relevant facts: The IBM BookManager product preceded all of the referenced citations by many years dating back to the very early 1980’s. It was originally built on and for mainframe computers - IBM VM, and IBM MVS operating systems specifically. IBM BookManager provided a unique state-of-the art commercial digital book library management system and electronic hypertext book browser solution with advanced search ranking technology and hypertext (based on IBM's SCRIPT/VS and GML) long before PC and MS DOS were viable platforms on which to support such technology and long before MS Windows and Apple. Commercial editions of IBM BookManager were ported to the DOS operating system with editions for Windows and OS/2 after those systems emerged (BookManager/2 and BookManager/Windows). Of all of the early electronic hypertext book systems, IBM BookManager was by far one of the earliest, if not the earliest, and most successful of them all; it was and continues to be used commercially to publish hundreds of thousands of electronic books by organizations worldwide to this very day. Try a Google search on any of the other works previously referenced and then do a Google search on IBM BookManager; the others cited are dwarfed by comparison. Anyone that doesn't think that GML and BookManger was an extremely significant milestone didn't grow up in I/T in the 70's and 80's or are too young to be aware of that history.
However, I fear the reviewers here miss the inventive contribution and the specific significance of the cited invention. IBM BookManager was only the vehicle; the referenced invention isn’t simply another basic hypertext document system or reader as most of the others are, it was specifically about the earliest introduction of hypertext embedded media players in readers (aka - like Flash) only months after PCs could barely play video. At the time of implementation the widely demonstrated system (in the US) used Intel’s pre-release technology to pipe the video from videodisc player to the embedded video widget launched by GML hypertext semantics. To be more specific on chronology, the invention was programmed by IBM Haifa Research Lab circa 1989; the reference invention disclosure was filed in the US patent office 1991; the invention disclosure was later published in a widely respected IBM Journal in July 1992.
Several of the other referenced systems followed substantially later - some by years. Upon reading the history of the previously referenced works none appear to cite hypertext launch of embedded video and audio widgets as prior art anywhere as early as this invention disclosure, if at all. That is the main point of the invention and the post - I contend it was a first. If someone can provide a link to any invention disclosure earlier than 1992 that specifically cites the hypertext embedding of media players in electronic hypertext books I would be obliged. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MikeIantosca ( talk • contribs) 03:40, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
That is because BookManager was widely used by literally hundreds of thousands of industry professionals for many years since the early 80's as an actual product for I/T shops, thus you'd not find anything about it in academic literature. I suggest we not limit our sights what was only done in academia as legitimate works - I believe that would be exceptionally narrow. That said...Mark's points are well taken. Because it wasn't presented at a major conference at the time and was only published as a US patent disclosure and published in an industry technical journal, we may never know who, if anyone, was influenced by it and thus cannot make any definitive claim that it had any significant impact in the overall evolution on the subject unless someone comes forward. However, it was clearly among the earliest actual coded implementations and there is no evidence whatsoever of any patent disclosures using those specific techniques filed prior to it. The said it was filed as a defensive disclosure and the a patent never sought - it instead went to publish status. Had the patent been sought it would have not been sought for hypermedia but for much narrower and specific art and I believe the defensive submission helped the industry by putting put prior art officially on record at the US patent office. Yes, there were theories that preceded it but there wasn’t anything as specific as that implementation filed in the patent office before it. Extensive searches for prior art was performed by patent attorneys and no prior art was found at the time (folks need to remember the era – there was no web to search in 1991 and prior art searches were generally limited to what was already filed with the patent office). So in conclusion I withdraw my arguments for inclusion. However, I believe that it would be appropriate to cite it among its peers on early systems if such an additional section should ever be added as Mark suggested. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
MikeIantosca (
talk •
contribs) 11:43, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
I've removed a long discussion of Tim Sheridan's reported contribution to the invention of hypertext. I was at Hypertext 87, and have been part of the program committee for most of the subsequent hypertext conferences, and I'm quite familiar with the literature. I've never heard of this work. I don't believe it's every been cited. The section was poorly sourced. It may have been a hoax, or simply original research, or perhaps an axe being ground.
I've also removed, more reluctantly, a paragraph about Christoph Alexander. It's an interesting observation, but this sort of heavily cross-referenced writing was not unheard-of even in 1977; see the literature on "programmed instruction" for examples, as well as early fiction of Coover, Fowler, and (cited here) Borges. Moreover, my impression is that the Alexander book's cultural influence came in two waves; first, a period of professional interest centered rather tightly in Latin America and Southern France, and then -- much later -- a burst of interest in broader tech circles thanks to the Gang of Four and their book Design Patterns. The first appearance of patterns in the hypertext literature was a Daniel Schwabe paper in '96 or '97, followed by my "Patterns of Hypertext" paper in '98. MarkBernstein ( talk) 14:44, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
hi, just wanted to point out that the redirection to this page from 'hypotext' is inaccurate. Heterodiamond ( talk) 17:34, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
Barsa143 introduced a section of "Forms Of Hypertext", proposing a division among axial, arborescent, and network structures. Rhododendrites reverted this for WP:OR and WP:V.
The scheme is unreferenced, and perhaps even Barsa143 thought it was OR, but good references would not be hard to find. This is, in fact, the topic of this year's Engelbart Award paper from Hypertext '13:
The underlying analysis is quite old; see, for example, H. van Dyk Parunak’s
and Landow's rhetoric of arrival and departure:
I might also mention
The tripartite scheme is too simple, and privileges simple hypertexts (axial is more often called annotative and arborescent is usually simply called tree), but it's not entirely silly. On the whole, it's better to add citations to a badly source passage than simply to delete it as OR. This might be WP:UNDUE, but surely the structure of hypertext is a reasonable topic for an article about hypertext, especially as structural questions have been prominent in research from the beginning. MarkBernstein ( talk) 18:51, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
I just noticed that User:Sofia Koutsouveli inserted two major inaccuracies on 17 March 2014 that have not been corrected:
1. Actually, the Memex could not implement hypertext, as is obvious to anyone who has read the relevant works by Michael Buckland and G. Pascal Zachary. 2. Xanadu wasn't a model, it was supposed to be a full-fledged business and technological enterprise. It is clear from Nelson's own books that he wanted to be what Thomas Hughes would call a system builder.
Any objections before I fix this? -- Coolcaesar ( talk) 05:21, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Hypertext is not just flat text with highlights or paragraphs omitted during display, but rather, the text is hyper-structured with hyperlinks or other structures embedded inside a page, including hidden search words, to control the display and connection with other pages or hypertext nodes.
This information deleted from the lead section is in need of clarification, I think. Why should highlights or paragraphs be omitted ever? What is a highlight? What does "hyper-structured" mean? What is a hypertext node? Embedded how? Control the display of what? No context or sources are given, and therefore the relevance of this information is not clear. Half of it seems to be jargon. — Coconutporkpie ( talk) 05:18, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
See Talk:History of hypertext. -- Coolcaesar ( talk) 12:16, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
In the Hypertext Fiction section, there is mention of Marshall McLuhan and paradigm shifts. I would like to suggest an edit point to some research completed by Ray Siemens et. al ("HCI-Book? Perspectives on E-Book Research 2006-2008") [1] that reader research is still in its infancy and requires significant development. Pointing to that article and including a citation would, I think, be productive for alerting interested readers to new modes of research. Thenewpulp ( talk) 22:17, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
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This edit request by an editor with a conflict of interest has now been answered. |
Hello, I would like to recommend an addition to the paragraph that discusses Marshall McLuhan and ends with "hypertext links." Please find it below:
Importantly, this development puts the reader, rather than the author, at the center of the paradigm made available by hypertexts. Yet “the figure of the reader in much editorial theory often remains abstract and even mystified” in modern scholarship.” [1]
Note: I am a Wikipedian-in-Residence and further information about this position can be found at my Profile page. Thenewpulp ( talk) 21:26, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
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Gopher (protocol) pre-dated the WWW in announcement by less than a year, but in wide deployment by several years, and had a strong influence on the information-architecture approach and the adoption pattern of the WWW. Organizations that had gopher servers already had an arranged document tree, managed by system administrators capable of quickly and easily making this content available via an additional protocol, after addition of some (technically optional) HTML index pages. I was actually professionally in this field during the transition, and remember the process (internally where I worked, and across thousands of university, government, and other servers) very well. Our article on gopher already has some sources that can be used in this article, but it'll be worth digging for some that go more into the gopher–WWW relationship. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:16, 4 June 2018 (UTC)
Until this [ [9]] edit in 2011, the origin of the term ‘hypertext’ was held to be 1965. The cited edit changed this (incorrectly) to 1963 but gave no reference. Yet ‘hypertext’ is only first known, in print, from in three contexts all in 1965:
Whilst Nelson likely had the notion of interlinked documents for some while previously, it was thus August 1965 when the use of the word ‘Hypertext’ was first recorded in print. Indeed, in the Vassar talk (and in Vassar internal publications reporting int) the form used was ‘hypert-text’, reflecting the lack of a clearly cited usage.
The Ted Nelson pages correctly references the August 1965 ACM Conference but—likely due to this page—then incorrectly states 1963 as the origin source.
Correcting this and the derivative error on the Ted Nelson page should fix a large number of incorrect of references that use this page's body copy as a primary source (rather than that page's correct [sic] primary sources).
Further reference sources: Nelson's Literary Machines (Editions '81 through '93), Belinda Barnet's Memory Machines (Ch.4, 2013, Anthem Press), Dechow & Stuppa's Intertwingled; the work and influence of Ted Nelson (2015, Springer Open) Mwra ( talk) 21:56, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
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It is very noticable that this article is much more about MEMEX than about hyperlinks? Can someone add stuff on hypertexts themselves? Bit strange having html as a "see also"? -- (talk to) BozMo 10:31, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
Most of what is here really should become a separate article about Memex since Memex is much more than an early form of electromechanical-microfilm hypertext concept. And there should also be a separate article on hypertext where there would only be a few lines and a link to the Memex article, within a history of the conceptual ancestors of "real" hypertext. But I am not going to write it since my domain of knowledge is the Office of the future (and how it was viewed in the past), and I am afraid I would goof up an hypertext article. AlainV 02:31, 2004 May 24 (UTC)
While it may be true in today's common usage to say that "a hypertext system is one for displaying information that contains references (called hyperlinks) to other information on the system," this is certainly not true historically. This, instead, is the limited sense of "hypertext" popularized by applications such as HyperCard, Storyspace, and the World Wide Web -- media organized as relatively-discrete nodes connected by (perhaps dynamic) links.
This definition was not that employed either at the term's coinage (by Theodor Holm Nelson) or by early pioneers of hypertext systems (such as Douglas Engelbart). Nelson defined hypertext as a subset of "hypermedia" (media that "branch or perform on request") and gave both link-based ("discrete hypertext") and level of detail-based ("stretchtext") examples. (The term was defined in 1965, in "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate." The examples were given in 1970, in "No More Teachers' Dirty Looks.") Engelbart used the term "hypertext" to refer to all the new document capabilities enabled by the fine-grained addressing of his oN-Line System (NLS). These included linking, but also dynamically-created views at mixed levels of detail, other new modes of navigation, and so on. (See, for example, Engelbart's "mother of all demos" in 1968.)
For more on the Nelson part of this history, see my short paper on the subject: What Hypertext Is (ACM Hypertext 2004).
It seems odd to me that the HyperText Transport Protocol is not mentioned in the article. I feel that a protocol designed to facilitate networked hypertext systems would be worthy of at least a link. Anyone disagree? - mjb 22:00, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)
obviously there owuld need to be passwords or some kind of identy verification depending on which page you were editing.
Tim Sheridan sparky@navpoint.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.94.233.174 ( talk) 15:15, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
The article mentions Wikimedia (the foundation). In this context, shouldn't that be MediaWiki (the software) instead? -- Steven Fisher 06:36, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
``Guide was the first hypertext system for personal computers, but was not very successful.``
What is meant by "successful" in the above quote? You see "the first hypertext system for personal computers" is in effect equivalent to the Memex for personal use as dreamed by the visionary Vannevar Bush in 1945. Arguably, his dream had come true through Guide forty years later at last! So granted, it ought to be mentioned at least WHO on earth developed that damn stuff. You know what I mean, I hope. -- KYPark 15:50, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Last year, OWL [...] startled the hypertext community by creating a program that contained neither data nor hypertext links, but only an empty screen and the tools to create a hypertext environment. In bringing out Guide, it was as if OWL had published a book with a blank pages and thoughtfully included a pen.
Where established hypertext producers [...] supply both data and links, OWL decided to approach the other way around. Guide provides no set text to work from; data are user-supplied, as are the hypertext links. Using Guide is as close as you're likely to get to do-it-yourself hypertext.
Suppose you are writing with Guide's word processor and want to add a comment [hidden from] the text itself. Using [...] a "button," you key onto a word in the text to create a hypertext link to a blank screen; you write the comment there. When you finish the note, you return to the main screen and proceed with the next.
Suppose further that after storing the completed text to disk in Guide format, you start another, unrelated document. If If you decide [...] to establish a relationship between the two documents, you can create a hypertext link usig the tools provided in Guide. That link will give full access to both documents -- from either file.
While it certainly isn't hypermedia, neither is Guide limited to mere text, Charts, drawings, and even photos can be inserted into Guide files [...].
Among the many applications offered by Guide are outline processing, word processing, desktop publishing, free-form data bases, and educational training aids. The program's graphics capabilities even enable the user to create slide shows on screen, with pictures that take their cue from path established in the hypertext environment. The user may wander at will among the various screens, keying onto topics [...] of interest, bypassing those that are not.
While Guide incorporates many of the functions of the earlier large-scale hypertext systems, it is geared more toward the individual [...]. It could turn out to be a single-user version of Xanadu. -- TJB [my boldface]
-- Guide: Do-It-Yourself Hypertext? [a special column singly highlighted in:] T. J. Byers, Built by Association, PC World, April 1987 (Special Report: CD ROM Goes to Work), 5(4), 244-251. [This surprising article is one of References of Hypertext. -- KYPark 08:10, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
[Panasonic OWL] developed "Guide", the world's first hypertext authoring system (predating the Web). [...].
It wasn't the first, but I remember when it came out, and they were making that claim back then, too, and never backed down from it. Here's a history that includes Owl (but not as the first): http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~wwwbtb/book/chap1/htx_hist.html [broken]
Owl is credited in Tim Berners-Lee's book, "Weaving the Web". Tim approached them about modifying Guide to support the internet work he was thinking of, but it seems no-one there was interested. [my boldface]
-- http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PanasonicOwl -- KYPark 08:10, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Actually, the company was known as Office Workstations Limited before the European part became Panasonic OWL and the American part became InfoAccess (which was taken over by Stellent during the dot-com collapse). Also, Guide was initially created by Peter Brown, an academic, and then licensed by his university to OWL. I have his original paper about the original version of Guide lying around here somewhere. And yes, I have seen those fascinating issues of PC World from 1987 on microfilm.
It's important to look at the big picture and try to avoid writing Whiggish history. If you don't know why "Whiggish" is a bad word among historians (it's actually almost an insult when one accuses another of writing in that style), you have a lot of reading to do.
Getting back to my point, the fact that Guide did have some revolutionary features for its time (in the sense that OWL was the first to implement those features on the PC) still doesn't change the fact that it was always a niche product (in comparison to the mainstream apps of the mid-1980s like WordPerfect and Ventura Publisher). Of course, so was HyperCard, initially --- although HyperCard at least got a lot more attention and mindshare.
When you're researching computer history, it's important to look at not only the articles surrounding the release of a new product (which are often full of hype and lack the perspective that comes only with experience), but also the articles 3 or 5 or 7 years later to see whether the product flourished or died in the market. Try looking at articles on Guide from 1990 or 1992 or 1994 and see where Guide was then (I have). By 1993 it was just another high-end expensive electronic publishing product being paraded around at trade shows along with 10 other major competitors (along with Folio Views and eBT), while HyperCard had won the hearts of the PC masses.
-- Coolcaesar 23:28, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Prof. Peter Brown (retired a few years ago) worked at the University of Kent, England, together with his wife Prof. Heather Brown, expert in the Office Document Architecture (ODA), de facto European standard competing with the American SGML. Berners-Lee may have been swinging between ODA and SGML. At least he knew much about the couple, including their interests.
That is to say, anyway, it seems (to me at least) that the history of hypertext used to be described overwhelmingly along the American paradigm. Simply this may be unfair if not untrue, mere "local effect," and violate NPOV! There may be another hidden European, especially British, paradigm or thread as well. A radical American conservatism or nationalism appears overriding and shadowing the hypertext landscape in reality.
Note that in the beginning few mentioned Herbert Wells, and now some mention even Paul Otlet, both still rather negatively, while the contemporary Vannevar Bush always positively. All were dreamers whose influence defies an easy objective evaluation. The truth is yet to come. Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson may have been affected by Otlet and Wells much more than Bush, though no reference was made to them. Furthermore, we may better start from James Joyce and T. S. Eliot in the 1920s to know well why hypertext. Be advised that I am working hard preparing myself to show it up. Perhaps I would start like this:
``From the early 20th century, the idea of hypertext was eloquently and repeatedly motivated by "selection" of the right information from the messy mass publication rather than by publication to add up to such a mass...``
Let me make it simple and ask you why it is so hesitating to add some of the essential 6W's in describing history properly. The short passage I quoted in the beginning was below the minimum essential, I fear. Such a passage missing some 6W's is likely quite misleading as well as incomplete in itself, to be sure. To know Guide was one year earlier than HyperCard free of charge is to know it would be hard to compete after all even at a reasonable price. Such is exactly the case between Navigator and Internet Explorer. The strong eat the weak. This is the market! So I am so sorry though a copyleftist loving freewares and Richard Stallman. I love to see ideas rather than prices compete fair so that the weak but creative can survive.
In response to my suggestion to do Guide some 6W kinda favor, you have made it a little longer but done it more harm, I fear again. -- KYPark 16:27, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have no idea where you are going with your rambling and ungrammatical English. What do you mean by "6W's?" If you're talking about who, where, when, what, etc., you really need to do some reading about basic historiography---which is so much more than that.
Anyway, I do know about ODA, and the short-lived HyperODA project. I also know why ODA failed---because it was based on ASN.1. And yes, I do have multiple sources on file discussing ASN.1's failings in detail, including the NSF study from 1991 or 1992. There was also a project that attempted to implement ODA on top of SGML but that went nowhere.
The fact is, whether you like it or not, Engelbart and Nelson were not influenced by Otlet because they did not know about him. Engelbart has never mentioned Wells, though in his important 1962 paper he was careful to cite both Whorf and Bush. I think Nelson may have mentioned Wells somewhere in those rambling pigpens of paper he calls "books", but I'm not sure.
As for Bush, I vaguely recall that there has been a lot of speculation in the academic journals about whether Bush knew of Otlet's work, but no one has turned up any solid proof. A lot of people have pointed out, though, including Bush's biographer, G. Pascal Zachary, that Bush was an engineer by training. He despised the humanities and never talked to librarians (even though they could have helped him refine his ideas about the memex), so it is unlikely he would have gotten along with a lawyer-turned-proto-information-scientist like Otlet.
If you're trying to get at whether there was an alternate non-American hypertext research project (apart from the Web, of course, which soon became an American project when Berners-Lee moved to the U.S.), there's always videotex. If you look at some of the academic studies of videotex from the early 1980s, they encountered many of the problems in content structure that were later encountered in the mid-1990s by early Web site developers. The link maps often used by Web site developers to organize Web sites in development actually originated back then with the early videotex systems.
-- Coolcaesar 18:30, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Redikillus! Don't bother where I am going with my rambling and ungrammatical English. Simply regard 6W as a symbol of my invention if not convention, and as a matter of vocabulary rather than grammar. And please let me know how to say something better than I said disgusting you. But you don't have to discourage me from telling the hidden truth to undermine and deconstruct the local effect or alleged "Legacy" From Memex to Hypertext that you suggested to me at first.
Coolcaesar, you are too honest to deny that you are too patriotic to affirm neutrally what foreigners have done so well, I guess. So you look so jealous. I have no idea either where you are going with your rambling and unreasonable chauvinistic nationalism plus exclusivism comparable with Nazism. It was when the frantic Nazism was at its height that H. G. Wells proposed the ideas of World Encyclopedia and World Brain as a solution to the World Problem for the World Peace. He was struggling against evil nationalism and professionalism.
You would know that Wells has been well known all over the world, and far more influential than Otlet especially in the Anglo-American scene. But you might not know that both communicated with each other! So whose idea is original is rather obscure. Then the next question worthy of asking would be whether Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, and Berners-Lee, for example, were influenced by Wells regardless of Otlet in relation to the Web and hypertext. Obviously, you as well as all of them are not well prepared so far to answer this question.
Nevertheless, suppose they were unaware of the ideas of World Brain and World Encyclopedia based on the "world-wide network" as his ambitious and eloquent solution to the "World Problems" for the "World Peace." Then they suffer too painful lack of the right information for a well-done claim. On the other hand, suppose they were aware of it. Then they appear to suffer so deplorable lack of scientist and scholarly morality that they may well be suspected of intellectual piracy. The similarity and disparity between his (as well as Otlet's) and their ideas will turn out sooner or later.
Meanwhile, a striking parallelity may be noteworthy in terms of well-known British/less-known Belgian, between Wells/Otlet and Berners-Lee/Cailliau, known as the co-inventors of the World Wide Web, which looks like rewording of "world-wide network" as coined by Wells. Rewording is rewarding more often than not!
Let me tell you one more thing. As far as I know, Michael Lesk was the first computer/information scientist who accepted Wells as one of the pioneers in the Web and hypertext development, and W. B. Rayward was the first library/information scientist who claimed both Otlet and Wells as such. Coincidentally Lesk (American) and Rayward (Australian) stayed at University College London as a visiting professor. -- KYPark 17:19, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have no idea where you are going with this. Your incoherent reasoning is full of fallacies, speculation, and non sequiturs. For example, "rewording is rewarding" is the kind of childish inference that has been unfashionable ever since most intellectuals came to accept the general axiom that correlation does not equal causation. Correlation may support a "hunch" that starts a separate investigation into causation, but causation must always be separately proved. You have no understanding of even the essentials of logic.
To restate the point more bluntly, you are making the kind of bizarre inferences which are characteristic of the ramblings of schizophrenics (and yes, I have read extensively about them). I strongly advise you to seek medical assistance immediately. -- Coolcaesar 17:57, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
``I have no idea where you are going with this. Your incoherent reasoning is full of fallacies, speculation, and non sequiturs ... childish inference ... no understanding of even the essentials of logic ... bizarre inferences ... ramblings of schizophrenics ... I strongly advise you to seek medical assistance immediately.`` [AZ]
I should say, "AFTER YOU!"
I really mean it now beyond reasonable doubt. From the very beginning I have dared to guess or infer from your words that you are highly symptomatic of radical American nationalsim plus exclusivism such that you are too radical for NPOV! As you neither deny nor affirm it, it appears evident now that this should be the place for you AFTER YOU "seek medical assistance" as borrowed from your words. I believe that this should not remain the place for evil nationalist and professionalist brainwashing propaganda but neutral brainstorming discussion.
Instead of either denying or affirming proudly that you are such a radical, you have ridiculously offended me again and again. Yet it would be not too late for you to clear or give it up rather than shy away. I wish you to be a man of courage or virtus in ancient Greek.
You confuse designative or descriptive reference to something with argumentative or prescriptive inference from something. In contrast to right or wrong prescriptive inference, descriptive reference is either true or false such that the World Wide Web looks like rewording of "world-wide network," and that rewording is rewarding more often than not. And these references were suggested as likelihood rather than certainty. It is not a fallacy that "rewarding is rewarding." It describes or refers to a common reality of plagiarism where rewording is cause and rewarding is effect.
Meanwhile, I offered little inference of my own, though some may be implied between the lines in context. Nevertheless it is evil of you to blame me for "incoherent reasoning...full of fallacies, speculation, and non sequiturs." For I am not really responsible for such implications that you may unlimitedly infer (deduce/induce/abduce) at will from my explicit references. You could blame me if my references were false. Instead, however, you argue wrong as if I explicitly dictated a lot of wrong inference, most likely because my references clash with your radical black and white mindset, don't you?
This encyclopedia as well as the underlying World Wide Web, based on extensible nature of hypertext, is destined to contribute to global beyond local utilitarianism on the one hand, and to user-centrism on the other. In retropect there have been two mainstreams of hypertext development, namely, open integral utilitarianism and secret fragmentary commercialism which have been inherited to date. The former may be traced back to H. G. Wells and Vannevar Bush and roughly marked by the earlier stage of development, while the latter traced back to Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson and so marked by the later stage. Then the open, integral, non-commerical, user-centric, utilitarian WWW emerged overshadowing fragmentary commercialism.
That is to say, short-sighted, narrow-minded, commercial, dull and lazy men came in late (See: Hypertext '87 keynote address) to make it their own creativity and profession under the banner of hypertext that sounds a misnomer (See: Text retrieval section below). You are supposed to be one of them. See "the big picture" as borrowed from your words, that is, what hypertext is all about!
Anyway, it is up to Wikipedia readers all around the world, to judge which one is the loser of this game symptomatic of KO, while the other the winner of OK, though it is almost self-evident from our past experiences as well as this very context. -- KYPark 16:12, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
Please answer the above question in a word. I cordially ask:
Wikipedia is a great surprise or mutation that has sprung from the largest market where extreme commercialism and capitalism were dominating, where they definitely deferred something utilitarian like the French CNRS and the Russian VINITI, and preferred fragmentary for-profit information analysis centers that sooner or later failed in making profit enough for survival. Refer to the Roman Pucinski's proposal for a National Research Data Processing and Information Retrieval Center, the Arthur D. Little's counter-proposal, "Do not support large-scale centralization of mechanized document retrieval facilities...", and the Mansfield Amendment of 1973 that seriously affected Engelbart.
The utilitarian World Wide Web originated from the EU, allegedly if not practically independent from the US, and decisively conquered most of the fragmentary hypertext territory. It meant a completely new orientation and motivation for the next hypertext applications. Other utilitarian ones have evolved from the Web, including Google, CiteSeer, and Wikipedia. The impact appears to be much more devastating than the Sputnik in which case such apologism that space science and technology had been "a primarily American phenomenon" must not have been terribly convincing.
Hypertext looks like something better than nothing until the advent of CD-ROM, which was soon followed by the user-centric Guide and then HyperCard. Where there is digital text, there is hypertext however primitive. There is little surprise indeed. -- KYPark 17:38, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
>
Again, your odd analysis is unconvincing, because your grasp on the basic facts is so poor. Many for-profit information services were already thriving by 1989, including Westlaw and LexisNexis. Also, even in 1989, American consumers were already being bombarded with advertisements for America Online and CompuServe. Plus there were the videotex experiments of the early 1980s like Viewtron.
CERN is located in Switzerland, which is not part of the European Union. Although it's true that CERN was the birthplace of the Web and the first Web design firm and Web directory were started by CERN employees, most of the other subsequent "firsts" occurred in the U.S., including the first newspaper to regularly publish to the Web (the Palo Alto Weekly), and the first college with a Web site (Honolulu Community College).
Also, by grouping Google with two nonprofit operations, Citeseer and Wikipedia, you seem to have forgotten that Google is a commercial, public for-profit corporation that just launched its IPO last year. Although its founders claim to be guided by the rule "Don't do evil," they are ultimately bound to act in the best interest of the shareholders like the officers of any other corporation.
At this point, I think I am inclined to give up this debate for now, because it is clear we cannot agree on any salient points. While I have enjoyed debating the history of hypertext with you, I do not think we will be reaching any agreement in the near future, and there are other areas of Wikipedia which I would prefer to focus on at this time. Perhaps when some other third party joins this debate then I will jump back in. -- Coolcaesar 07:52, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
I did not pretend a bird's-eye view on American information services, but simply focus on the fact that the American scientific information policy after the Sputnik shock preferred for-profit decentralization marked by information analysis centers to non-profit centralization. Westlaw and LexisNexis are out of scientific context. America Online and CompuServe are Internet Service Providers rather than information services proper, not to mention information analysis centers.
On the other hand, the Internet or the earlier is a non-profit centralization and outcome from that shock. Originally, however, it was designed as information infrastructure only for advanced research. For many years at first, it was mostly used for e-mails. Then the Gopher emerged as a true information service only to be overshadowed upon advent of the Web, which in addition soon drove the Internet open to the public. The Web based on hypertext has undermined and determined even the fate of the underlying Internet up to utilitarianism.
The primary feature of the Web in origin was as simple as to click on the reference number (or the keyword) in context to retrieve the so-referenced document on screen. Many people had spoken of hypertext, but few had thought of the vitality of reference numbers and nearby keywords in context as "associative trails" everywhere in sientific literature. -- KYPark 17:45, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
Coolcaesar, you did tell the truth that "CERN is located in Switzerland, which is not part of the European Union." Nevertheless, while I was so careless in mistaking, you look so careful in misleading or suggesting as if CERN located in Switzerland were owned or run by her rather than by a number of European member countries, most of which are also the EU member countries.
You know the idea and creation of the Web used to be credited to one man, Sir Berners-Lee, rather than the CERN teamwork, though rather unusually. Then, my passage "The utilitarian World Wide Web originated from the EU..." is not too bad.
While the status and role of CERN is tricky anyway, what exactly do you mean by that hypersensitive passage otherwise than to try to upset the overall credibility of my words using my marginal mistakes? You are supposed to be so cunning and misleading, showing up your evil Machiavellism. -- KYPark 17:24, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
Text retrieval (TR) is simply cross-reference (XR) from text to text, hence hypertext (XT). That is, the ideas of TR, XR, XT, and the like largely overlap and closely resemble one another. XR splits into XR in context (XRIC) and XR out of context (XROC) in close analogy to KWIC and KWOC long ago, respectively. The narrow or common sense of hypertext implies XRIC, while the wide or true sense includes XROC as well. From the text retrieval point of view, hypertext as a new retrieval paradigm, objecting to XROC or subjecting itself mainly to XRIC, sounds like a self-defeating misnomer, because text retrieval and cross-reference well comprise both XROC and XRIC in themselves. Hypertext was coined in 1965 by Ted Nelson who used to object to the wide spectrum of text retrieval or cross-reference and subject it mainly to the narrow idea of transclusion, or simply quotation, aiming for text patchwork rather than retrieval. -- KYPark 16:12, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
I am created as equal as Ted Nelson (as well as C. S. Peirce) who used to dictate notoriously his own terminological invention beyond well-established convention, including hypertext, transclusion, docuverse, literary machine, and so on. Words are not given by God but invented by man one after another to add up to the millenia old convention. The English vocabulary is supposed to count 800 thousand -- a redundancy (from the Basic English perspective) of almost a hundred times the Basic English! So in principle I object to invention of new words as well as use of unusual ones.
Simply I split cross-reference (XR) as the key to text retrieval into XRIC and XROC with respect to context, triggered internally or externally, on the fly or behind the curtain, if you like. I may be the first to note such a dichotomy of text retrieval including hypertext. XRIC and XROC are mere shorthands so that you need not take them seriously but the ideas and perhaps words for which they stand as extension or refinement of KWIC and KWOC confined within document titles. Cross-references or hyperlinks do not necessarily fall on keywords but also on reference numbers and icons, for example. Thus the classic but crude ideas of KWIC and KWOC need to be extended or refined so as to be general enough. -- KYPark 17:47, 5 May 2005 (UTC)
-- KYPark 19:29, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
The content added from the ON reference remains in this article, but the reference has been removed. This action is disputed and a conversation is ongoing here. Uriah923 06:32, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
No Mention of BT's failed attempt to claim a prior patent on hyperlinks. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/23/bt_loses_hypertext_claim/
We can to diferenciating betwen hypertex(literature) and hypertex, becauste is diferent. -- 199.26.12.5 15:20, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
If you mean hypertext as literature and hypertext as technology, you are right that they are different concepts, but I see no point in creating a new article because they are tightly interrelated. -- Coolcaesar 23:28, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
The recent TabTalk addition is interesting and seems worth citing. But I think it would be better if moved to a separate TabTalk page to receive the current multi-paragraph description, along with a link in addition to the patent reference to support "No original research" criteria.
Then collapse the multi-paragraph TabTalk discussion to a sentence interleaved with the other synopsis of notable hypertext systems. Grlloyd 11:19, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
I just cleaned the article up quite a bit, putting the information under appropriate headings and in a more readable, prose-like form. I tried not to lose or change information, however, I would not be surprised if this did happen during the process. Feel free to adjust this as necessary. My biggest problem was coming up with an easily-understandable, concise definition of the title term in the intro. Wrad 23:57, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, Wrad, judging from what happenend over the past week, it looks like Jstanley and then your own well-intentioned edits have created a vague, ambiguous, incomprehensible, and inaccurate mess which is actually much worse than what was there before. The longstanding definition, which I drafted back in 2004, looked like this: [3] Over time, various people kept fooling around with it and it got worse and worse until Jstanley really screwed it up on 12 April (I think he is a nonnative English speaker).
Anyway, to be specific, Wrad, about the issues I have with the current version:
I think we should go back to my old definition. What do other people think?-- Coolcaesar 06:46, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I can see your point with #1, and as I said this particular sentence worried me. I would appreciate your help. The fifth sentence, though is actually pretty much exactly the same as before, we can't really "go back" on it. Other than that, the problems you mention are rather small punctuation and grammar problems, easily fixed. I think that your reading of the paragraph is a bit over-negative here. The fact is, it was pretty bad before. I don't think going back is the answer. This article has had a cleanup tag on it for about 5 months. Somebody needed to clean it up.
The problem with the old version was that it was broken up into four or five different paragraphs. It was also full of jargon and a bit wordy, I thought. I know what hypertext is, and I couldn't understand the old definition. Imagine what someone who didn't know would have thought on reading it.
Also, could you please watch your tone when proofreading? I don't think your naming names is appropriate, especially as your argument for their edits being "a vague, ambiguous, incomprehensible, and inaccurate mess which is actually much worse than what was there before" is extremely debatable given the sad state the article was in before their changes. Wrad 13:05, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I made some adjustments as per your suggestions. I believe it is much better now. Wrad 14:23, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
I've got a question. The reference style in this article seems pretty varied. It starts with a parenthetical style in the intro, then moves to web links (which I changed to refs for the time being. No other parenthetical in-line citation exist in the article, but there is a nice list of references at the bottom. How can we make this more uniform? Wrad 21:40, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Another problem: the "Invention of Hypertext" and "Applications" sections are really jumbled, even after some attempts to make them more chronological. Can anyone take a look at these and make them more comprehensible? Wrad 23:29, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree with your cleanup work, and made a copyedit pass on "Early precursors" and "Memex" sections. The "Applications" section should probably be renamed "Hypertext before the Web" and link to Timeline of hypertext technology for context when it is copyedited. I'll take a crack at it over the next day or so unless someone else wishes to do so. -- Grlloyd 23:14, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I just removed the cleanup tag as the major problems seem to have been dealt with. Wrad 23:25, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, the article as it now stands still has several problems, which indicate to me that you are not familiar with any of the technical literature on this subject (I have 25 binders of information on hypertext on file, but I am not posting any citations to that material on Wikipedia since I am reserving that for a planned book).
Here are the current problems:
I highly recommend taking a course on the history of computing if you can find one in your area. -- Coolcaesar 07:50, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Kindly refrain from personal attacks. Thank you. If you see errors, improve the article, rather than reverting edits or posting every last one of my mistakes here. Everyone makes them, so please be kind. Cleanup ain't easy, and somebody's foot always gets stepped on. Wrad 14:54, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, I just came back and looked over your suggestions. The first one, I think is fine, so I didn't change it. I make it pretty clear in the first sentence that 'clicking' is its most common form, not a comprehensive thing. Linking, cross-referencing I changed. I kept user interfacing because I've read it in plenty of places, so I don't really see a problem. The Mendel thing wasn't very well explained in the old version. I understand it better now that you've elaborated, but I don't know where it would fit or how important it actually is. Isn't it enough to say that work was duplicated? I changed gopher protocol. Wrad 02:55, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
In the spirit of the ongoing cleanup, I removed the qualification that complex hypertexts can be developed "with a computer network like the internet". Many complex hypertexts are not networked. In practice, the hypertextuality of Web hypertext has been often been limited (see Les Carr's HT04 paper), while stand-alone hypertexts like afternoon or The Victorian Web are richly linked. MarkBernstein 16:49, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
Mark, the longstanding passage I had originally drafted (before it was mangled this month) was: "The documents and applications can be local or can come from anywhere with the assistance of a computer network like the Internet." Somehow in the past month, it fell apart into the inaccurate sentence that you just fixed. Turning to Wrad's latest revisions, here is my newest critique:
I'm just going to speak my mind here. The problems you see in your latest post would be best fixed by . . . you! If you want to change these little things, do it. Don't try to work through me. Even if I am convinced of what you say, as I am in many things, if I change it you'll see something else wrong with what I did and tell me I need to do more research (don't we all?). It would take you less than ten minutes to make these changes, whereas it has taken you weeks to try to get me to do it. Wrad 20:46, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Coolcaesar: You used 171 words worth of bandwidth on this page, holding forth about the article's anachronistic use of the term "user interfacing." I fixed the problem by deleting three characters and inserting two. Pues ¡Ya no me chingas! ô¿ô 00:41, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
I posted set of edits to this article as well as memex to provide more specific quotes and conclusions from Michael Buckland's published research on electronic documentation retrieval and Bush's Memex. One edit replaced a "The Memex" section statement that Goldberg invented a Memex-like device with short paragraph in "Early Precursors" section which I tried to craft as a fair but short summary of Buckland's research. See also the "Criticism" section of memex. -- Grlloyd 03:51, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
I added a bad paragraph, but then I did find the original source material. Reference to Buckland's criticism is valuable, but as originally presented, it was so out of context as to confuse the uninitiated more than enlighten. Just the omission of the date got me going, as 1992 is to a criticism of hypertext as 1450 is to a criticism of popular literacy.
5. "Associative trails." Bush had a low opinion of indexes and classification schemes:
"Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to use rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path." (Bush, 1945a, 106).
This account shows no awareness of the ability of indexing and classification systems to bring related material together through collocation and syndetic structure and indicates that Bush's understanding of information retrieval was severely incomplete. Bush declared, in effect, that retrieval should not function as conventional indexes do but as the human brain does, i.e. "as we may think." Bush thought that the creation of arbitrary associations between individual records was the basis of memory, so he wanted a "mem(ory-)ex", or "Memex instead of index." The result was a personalized, but superficial and inherently self-defeating design. Instead of indexing documents directly by their contents or characteristics, Bush proposed coding documents by their perceived relevance to some theme, such as the superiority of the short Turkish bow during the crusades. Documents perceived as relevant to the same theme were thereby linked to each other by a common coding, which provided a "trail" through the collection of documents. In effect, however, each trail is an indexing concept and the code for each trail is, in effect, an indexing term.
Relevance judgements, however, are notoriously inconsistent, situational, and likely to change as one's knowledge evolves. Since Bush's trails were based, not on the contents of the document but on perceived relevance of documents to trails, any individual's pattern of trails would be unlikely to be satisfactory for any other user. A personalized information system may be advantageous for an individual but has limited usefulness for others. Furthermore, perceptions of relevance are less stable than perceptions of subject content. For this reason conventional subject-based indexing remains tolerable, indeed preferable, in practice, because a system based directly on relevance, as in the Memex, could not change itself automatically to reflect continuously changing perceptions of relevance. The trails, being based on one individual's personal knowledge and perceptions of relevance, would be highly obsolescent. As a user's knowledge increased, perceptions of relevance would change, and the trails would need to be remade. Any given pattern of trails would remain appropriate only so long as the user did not learn anything from the use of the Memex--or in any other way.
I find that to be a rather large departure from the original quote. To my mind Bush is not directing his remark toward the ontology of information retrieval. It's rather a narrow remark about mechanical felicity. He begins by pointing out, in imprecise language, the artificiality of all collocation schemes. He is definitely beginning from the premise that index must exist relative to a (necessarily artificial) collocation order which defines the document retrieval path.
This is true up to a point. However, in electronic retrieval systems, the collocation order is now regarded as a low-level implementation detail. When a web server translates a URL path to a document path (if the file is served somewhat literally), most of the collocation takes place in the directory index structures implicit to the file system. URLs are regarded as distributed and hierarchical and not thought of as collocations at all.
I didn't immediately comprehend why Bush did not simply put forward that every document is simply granted a unique number (or hierarchical tupple) on inclusion to the information system. It is easy to accomplish this *within* a spool of microfilm. He seems to be thinking about problems associated with the interchange of spools. Well, you would need to duplicate a DNS-like system with a hierarchical numbering authority to ensure non-conflict. Does an index cover all the spools you might have or not have? That's a significant practical problem.
Nevertheless, I don't see the quote introduced by Buckland as reflecting on Bush's grasp of information retrieval in general. Bush is griping about an annoying practical problem which has subsequently been dealt with in the DNS/URL space. You have to have some system of reference in place to establish any kind of link from one document to another, or a position in another. It matters not whether you favour trails over indices. Bush's comment strikes me a gripe about the cumbersome nature of reference in general within the guise of a rigid collocation system.
The emergence of crowd-sourcing and folksonomies (ick, ick) challenge Buckland's assertions about "relevance judgements being notoriously inconsistent". Within the notorious inconsistency, (quasi) useful patterns nevertheless emerge. Here I think it is Buckland falling short of envisioning the automation required to extract those patterns on a practical basis, or the possibility of emergent categories as experienced on the Wikipedia.
I haven't studied the Bush material itself. How well did he manage to differentiate the mechanical issue of naming systems (potentially distributed) and document reference from his envisioned information structures within that system? I don't find Buckland's criticism particularly illuminating, but it does point the way to some important questions. I should point out my own bias that conceptual innovators tend to find themselves oscillating between theoretical modes of perception and pragmatic modes of perception, not yet being able to properly differentiate quite where the line belongs. It becomes much easier in retrospect to differentiate collocation orders from hierarchical naming systems. MaxEnt 01:27, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
Recent pruning of the external links to Hypertext Fiction included removing links to Eastgate_Systems. I think that's wrong. I'm an employee of Eastgate, but I'm also past program chair of the Hypertext Conference (twice), and I'm program chair of WikiSym 2008, and in this context I'd appreciate extension of assumption of good faith to this discussion. Eastgate has been publishing hypertext fiction since 1990, and its catalog includes the majority of titles discussed in books about literary hypertext, taught in courses on hypertext fiction, and examined in conferences and monographs. I'd prefer links to specific works of hypertext fiction in this place, but understand the desire for a concise list. Concision means trimming the list as much as possible, but not more. (I'd prefer to discuss this by email bernstein@eastgate.com if discussion is necessary) 18:44, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm fairly well acquainted with the new media literature its history, but I'm skeptical of the "Tutor-Tech's" claim to be the first hypermedia authoring tool. It was not part of Hypertext '87. I don't believe it was cited in Conklin's 1986 review article. It has not been widely discussed in histories of hypertext if, in fact, it has been discussed at all. The claim to priority is especially doubtful, since HES, FRESS, NLS/AUGMENT, and perhaps early versions of TIES and NOTECARDS were earlier. Broadly speaking, I think PLATO might be considered a sort of early hypertext tool.
For the present, I propose to edit the entry simply to remove the mistaken claim to priority. I think the best course for the poster, assuming he or she knows about Tutor-Tech, might be to write a short paper on the system and its contributions and publish it in the ACM Hypertext Conference or, perhaps, in a history of science conference, and then to come back and amend the encyclopedic history to incorporate it. MarkBernstein ( talk) 13:36, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
Miichael Iantosca recently added the following reference to the history section:
While this is not necessarily out of place, does this particular system merit inclusion here? The other systems described in this section, for better or worse, all had either widespread influence or attained a vast audience. BookManager didn't. Almost everything mentioned here post-1987 had a flagship paper at the ACM Hypertext Conference. I don't recall that BookManager did, though I might be confounding it with Bell Labs' Superbook. I don't recall hearing a paper on this, for example, at the 1992 European Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia in Milano. A number of other hypertext systems of this era are not mentioned here either -- PLATO, Microcosm, NoteCards, HAM, Ntergaid, Hyperties, Aquanet, HyperSet, Scripted Paths, Trellis, Gateway, and Symbolics Document Examiner spring to mind, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some very famous and influential papers here.
So, rather than adding an isolated system (though no doubt a very fine one), perhaps we should add a review of early hypertext systems? MarkBernstein ( talk) 14:13, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
Just for the record, this is a fully verifiable invention disclosure - possibly the earliest formally on file with the US Patent Office (cited) documenting prior art on the expansion of hypertext to hypermedia electronic books and book browsers using hypertext embedded media players. The disclosure was made public and published in IBM's widely distributed IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Volume 35 Number 2 prior the emergence of the first web browser. That journal was widely read - far more so than papers presented at technical conferences of the day. Before there was a web, BookManager – based on IBM’s GML – the precursor to IBM’s invention of SGML - was the by far the most prominent electronic book browser deployed worldwide with massive electronic libraries for I/T shops; it was used heavily in every large and mid-range IT shop worldwide. In fact, BookManager is still in use today in virtually every large IBM large systems (z/OS) shops worldwide. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
MikeIantosca (
talk •
contribs) 23:24, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
If presentation of a paper at a conference is a required criteria for accurate historical recognition of a formally filed, widely published and widely read invention disclosure, then you’ll need to disqualify far more than this entry. I contend history should reflect fact, not only what is popular and newsworthy. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
MikeIantosca (
talk •
contribs) 23:50, 27 July 2011 (UTC)
A few more relevant facts: The IBM BookManager product preceded all of the referenced citations by many years dating back to the very early 1980’s. It was originally built on and for mainframe computers - IBM VM, and IBM MVS operating systems specifically. IBM BookManager provided a unique state-of-the art commercial digital book library management system and electronic hypertext book browser solution with advanced search ranking technology and hypertext (based on IBM's SCRIPT/VS and GML) long before PC and MS DOS were viable platforms on which to support such technology and long before MS Windows and Apple. Commercial editions of IBM BookManager were ported to the DOS operating system with editions for Windows and OS/2 after those systems emerged (BookManager/2 and BookManager/Windows). Of all of the early electronic hypertext book systems, IBM BookManager was by far one of the earliest, if not the earliest, and most successful of them all; it was and continues to be used commercially to publish hundreds of thousands of electronic books by organizations worldwide to this very day. Try a Google search on any of the other works previously referenced and then do a Google search on IBM BookManager; the others cited are dwarfed by comparison. Anyone that doesn't think that GML and BookManger was an extremely significant milestone didn't grow up in I/T in the 70's and 80's or are too young to be aware of that history.
However, I fear the reviewers here miss the inventive contribution and the specific significance of the cited invention. IBM BookManager was only the vehicle; the referenced invention isn’t simply another basic hypertext document system or reader as most of the others are, it was specifically about the earliest introduction of hypertext embedded media players in readers (aka - like Flash) only months after PCs could barely play video. At the time of implementation the widely demonstrated system (in the US) used Intel’s pre-release technology to pipe the video from videodisc player to the embedded video widget launched by GML hypertext semantics. To be more specific on chronology, the invention was programmed by IBM Haifa Research Lab circa 1989; the reference invention disclosure was filed in the US patent office 1991; the invention disclosure was later published in a widely respected IBM Journal in July 1992.
Several of the other referenced systems followed substantially later - some by years. Upon reading the history of the previously referenced works none appear to cite hypertext launch of embedded video and audio widgets as prior art anywhere as early as this invention disclosure, if at all. That is the main point of the invention and the post - I contend it was a first. If someone can provide a link to any invention disclosure earlier than 1992 that specifically cites the hypertext embedding of media players in electronic hypertext books I would be obliged. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MikeIantosca ( talk • contribs) 03:40, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
That is because BookManager was widely used by literally hundreds of thousands of industry professionals for many years since the early 80's as an actual product for I/T shops, thus you'd not find anything about it in academic literature. I suggest we not limit our sights what was only done in academia as legitimate works - I believe that would be exceptionally narrow. That said...Mark's points are well taken. Because it wasn't presented at a major conference at the time and was only published as a US patent disclosure and published in an industry technical journal, we may never know who, if anyone, was influenced by it and thus cannot make any definitive claim that it had any significant impact in the overall evolution on the subject unless someone comes forward. However, it was clearly among the earliest actual coded implementations and there is no evidence whatsoever of any patent disclosures using those specific techniques filed prior to it. The said it was filed as a defensive disclosure and the a patent never sought - it instead went to publish status. Had the patent been sought it would have not been sought for hypermedia but for much narrower and specific art and I believe the defensive submission helped the industry by putting put prior art officially on record at the US patent office. Yes, there were theories that preceded it but there wasn’t anything as specific as that implementation filed in the patent office before it. Extensive searches for prior art was performed by patent attorneys and no prior art was found at the time (folks need to remember the era – there was no web to search in 1991 and prior art searches were generally limited to what was already filed with the patent office). So in conclusion I withdraw my arguments for inclusion. However, I believe that it would be appropriate to cite it among its peers on early systems if such an additional section should ever be added as Mark suggested. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
MikeIantosca (
talk •
contribs) 11:43, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
I've removed a long discussion of Tim Sheridan's reported contribution to the invention of hypertext. I was at Hypertext 87, and have been part of the program committee for most of the subsequent hypertext conferences, and I'm quite familiar with the literature. I've never heard of this work. I don't believe it's every been cited. The section was poorly sourced. It may have been a hoax, or simply original research, or perhaps an axe being ground.
I've also removed, more reluctantly, a paragraph about Christoph Alexander. It's an interesting observation, but this sort of heavily cross-referenced writing was not unheard-of even in 1977; see the literature on "programmed instruction" for examples, as well as early fiction of Coover, Fowler, and (cited here) Borges. Moreover, my impression is that the Alexander book's cultural influence came in two waves; first, a period of professional interest centered rather tightly in Latin America and Southern France, and then -- much later -- a burst of interest in broader tech circles thanks to the Gang of Four and their book Design Patterns. The first appearance of patterns in the hypertext literature was a Daniel Schwabe paper in '96 or '97, followed by my "Patterns of Hypertext" paper in '98. MarkBernstein ( talk) 14:44, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
hi, just wanted to point out that the redirection to this page from 'hypotext' is inaccurate. Heterodiamond ( talk) 17:34, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
Barsa143 introduced a section of "Forms Of Hypertext", proposing a division among axial, arborescent, and network structures. Rhododendrites reverted this for WP:OR and WP:V.
The scheme is unreferenced, and perhaps even Barsa143 thought it was OR, but good references would not be hard to find. This is, in fact, the topic of this year's Engelbart Award paper from Hypertext '13:
The underlying analysis is quite old; see, for example, H. van Dyk Parunak’s
and Landow's rhetoric of arrival and departure:
I might also mention
The tripartite scheme is too simple, and privileges simple hypertexts (axial is more often called annotative and arborescent is usually simply called tree), but it's not entirely silly. On the whole, it's better to add citations to a badly source passage than simply to delete it as OR. This might be WP:UNDUE, but surely the structure of hypertext is a reasonable topic for an article about hypertext, especially as structural questions have been prominent in research from the beginning. MarkBernstein ( talk) 18:51, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
I just noticed that User:Sofia Koutsouveli inserted two major inaccuracies on 17 March 2014 that have not been corrected:
1. Actually, the Memex could not implement hypertext, as is obvious to anyone who has read the relevant works by Michael Buckland and G. Pascal Zachary. 2. Xanadu wasn't a model, it was supposed to be a full-fledged business and technological enterprise. It is clear from Nelson's own books that he wanted to be what Thomas Hughes would call a system builder.
Any objections before I fix this? -- Coolcaesar ( talk) 05:21, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
Hypertext is not just flat text with highlights or paragraphs omitted during display, but rather, the text is hyper-structured with hyperlinks or other structures embedded inside a page, including hidden search words, to control the display and connection with other pages or hypertext nodes.
This information deleted from the lead section is in need of clarification, I think. Why should highlights or paragraphs be omitted ever? What is a highlight? What does "hyper-structured" mean? What is a hypertext node? Embedded how? Control the display of what? No context or sources are given, and therefore the relevance of this information is not clear. Half of it seems to be jargon. — Coconutporkpie ( talk) 05:18, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
See Talk:History of hypertext. -- Coolcaesar ( talk) 12:16, 11 August 2015 (UTC)
In the Hypertext Fiction section, there is mention of Marshall McLuhan and paradigm shifts. I would like to suggest an edit point to some research completed by Ray Siemens et. al ("HCI-Book? Perspectives on E-Book Research 2006-2008") [1] that reader research is still in its infancy and requires significant development. Pointing to that article and including a citation would, I think, be productive for alerting interested readers to new modes of research. Thenewpulp ( talk) 22:17, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
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This edit request by an editor with a conflict of interest has now been answered. |
Hello, I would like to recommend an addition to the paragraph that discusses Marshall McLuhan and ends with "hypertext links." Please find it below:
Importantly, this development puts the reader, rather than the author, at the center of the paradigm made available by hypertexts. Yet “the figure of the reader in much editorial theory often remains abstract and even mystified” in modern scholarship.” [1]
Note: I am a Wikipedian-in-Residence and further information about this position can be found at my Profile page. Thenewpulp ( talk) 21:26, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
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Gopher (protocol) pre-dated the WWW in announcement by less than a year, but in wide deployment by several years, and had a strong influence on the information-architecture approach and the adoption pattern of the WWW. Organizations that had gopher servers already had an arranged document tree, managed by system administrators capable of quickly and easily making this content available via an additional protocol, after addition of some (technically optional) HTML index pages. I was actually professionally in this field during the transition, and remember the process (internally where I worked, and across thousands of university, government, and other servers) very well. Our article on gopher already has some sources that can be used in this article, but it'll be worth digging for some that go more into the gopher–WWW relationship. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 22:16, 4 June 2018 (UTC)
Until this [ [9]] edit in 2011, the origin of the term ‘hypertext’ was held to be 1965. The cited edit changed this (incorrectly) to 1963 but gave no reference. Yet ‘hypertext’ is only first known, in print, from in three contexts all in 1965:
Whilst Nelson likely had the notion of interlinked documents for some while previously, it was thus August 1965 when the use of the word ‘Hypertext’ was first recorded in print. Indeed, in the Vassar talk (and in Vassar internal publications reporting int) the form used was ‘hypert-text’, reflecting the lack of a clearly cited usage.
The Ted Nelson pages correctly references the August 1965 ACM Conference but—likely due to this page—then incorrectly states 1963 as the origin source.
Correcting this and the derivative error on the Ted Nelson page should fix a large number of incorrect of references that use this page's body copy as a primary source (rather than that page's correct [sic] primary sources).
Further reference sources: Nelson's Literary Machines (Editions '81 through '93), Belinda Barnet's Memory Machines (Ch.4, 2013, Anthem Press), Dechow & Stuppa's Intertwingled; the work and influence of Ted Nelson (2015, Springer Open) Mwra ( talk) 21:56, 12 April 2024 (UTC)