ARTS & FARCES internet

Nothing much has happened around hypertext since Douglas Engelbart‘s earliest systems. Except the world wide web (and Ted Nelson‘s very entertaining—and enlightening—hand-waving). Proving he’s not ready to rust just yet, Engelbart is at it again, releasing HyperScope, a JavaScript-based hypertext system (Engelbart refers to it as “the first step toward his larger vision for an Open Hyperdocument System).

Outputting OPML files, the system is a little rough around the edges, but shows great promise—especially for very large documents. The system allows the view specifications—how a user views a document—to be changed. Additionally, different parts of the document can be addressed (think: a collapsible and automatic version of HTML’s anchor tag). View specifications can be embedded within a document’s addresses and every paragraph has an addressable location number. There’s also a command-line syntax, similar to that used in Engelbart’s early hypertext system, oNLine System (NLS), which was purchased by Tymshare and renamed Augment.

HyperScope is built around five big ideas, the first of which is that we need expert-oriented interfaces in addition to user-friendly graphical user interfaces. As Mac users become more comfortable with the command line and desktop Linux distributions like Ubuntu continue to evolve, this is a very big idea indeed.

Addressability within a document is another of Engelbart’s big ideas. “Hyperscope addresses specify a location in a document,” writes Engelbart, “as well as how you want to view that location.” But he’s also experimenting with better ways to navigate large document spaces: “However, if we know the structure of our documents and if we have the ability to jump around a document via an address, we can navigate around documents much, much faster.”

As a demo for the project, Engelbart has republished his seminal article, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” as a HyperScope document. Additional demos and tutorials are also available.