> A peculiarity in Storyspace is that links can point to several targets at the same time.
Wow, that’s a wild #hypertext/#InteractiveFiction idea!
From https://mprove.de/visionreality/text/2.1.11_storyspace.html
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> Initially also images are displayed in separate windows. This has the advantage that they stay visible whilst the user scrolls through the text.
Opening supplement material (figures, tables, code snippets) as separate views is a good idea, actually! Especially so—if this additional material does carry some information.
> The Navigate menu has BACK and NEXT and PREVIOUS commands. The last two should not be mixed up with the FORWARD command of today’s browsers. They do not reverse the BACK operation – they mean to go back a step and then take the next or previous link from the same page. NEXT and PREVIOUS commands make it possible to leaf through the Web like a book page by page with a single keystroke.
We’ve tried to do a similar thing in Nyxt, but we encountered the fact that modern #Web is too interlinked. So you can’t just follow the next link after the one you visited—it’s likely to be garbage. Still, we devised two approaches to this problem:
- Cruise Control mode—select a set of links that interest you and leaf through them in a oace suiting you.
- Tree-like browser history—allows visiting next/previous “sibling” links (links that were opened from the same page.) Not a navigation system per se, and requires visiting pages before leafing through. But I still love the idea. And I wrote my BA thesis on it!
> WorldWideWeb/Nexus is an integrated environment for browsing and editing #Web pages following the wysiwyg paradigm. It is as easy to read pages as to write them. For example just one command with the shortcut Cmd-Shift-N is needed to create a new #HTML page and link to it from the previous text selection. The user is prompted to specify a new URI and the page content is sent to the server with the #HTTP POST method.
The original paper mentions #W3C Amaya as the only modern browser implementing this feature, but it also reminds me of #Gemini #Titan protocol. Both good ideas and security nightmares!
This hypertext feature matrix [1] shows how inferior World Wide Web is to other (mostly earlier) hypertext systems. It has no link types, no paths/trails, no integrated tools. Nothing besides links and files really.
But I guess the simplicity and stupidity of the system is what made it The Hypertext. Allowing entry and implementation to everyone and evolving into a hack-driven ecosystem we all know and love. It might’ve benefited from features other systems had built-in, but these features emerged themselves when the system reached a necessary level of adoption and openness anyway.
[1] https://mprove.de/visionreality/text/2.2.1_hypertextmatrix.html
@aartaka Your comment about "hack-drive" made me think of this recent toot by @kentpitman:
https://climatejustice.social/@kentpitman/115266291463649519
It's hard to design complex stuff top-down. There were lots of ideas in early hypertext system, but how many of them were ever tested at the scale they were intended to operate on?
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