Winer’s sub-text: A stumble in the right direction

Published Saturday, 19 June 2010 10:56PM CST by in Publishing

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TypewriterDave Winer is at it again, and if you’re an online author or publisher you’d better pay close attention. Winer has completely reworked his writing environment (when you’re a programmer you can do that) and, most interestingly, he’s exposing parts of it on the web. His writing has source code, Winer notes. “It’s always been this way, but I’ve accepted the limits of other blogging tools, and the limits of RSS, and not exposed the richer writing environment behind scripting.com. That is changing, gradually, with the new software.”

The most visible addition to Winer’s output are little plus signs, signifying a link to contextual information—something Winer calls sub-text. Click on the plus sign and contextual—or, more likely at this early date, conversational—content is revealed. Winer refers to this as an “internet-age footnote” and says it’s related to Nick Carr’s misguided article about it being time to get hypertext links out of our way.

Carr says hypertext links are a distraction. “Sometimes, they’re big distractions—we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read,” Carr writes. Uh, that’s what browser tabs are for, Nick. Carr goes on to state (without citation), “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.” Without a citation, statements like that are of little use. From the abstract of “Reading Strategies and Hypertext Comprehension” from the November 2005 issue of Discourse Processes: “The literature on assessing the cognitive processes involved in hypertext comprehension during the past 15 years has yielded contradictory results.” (In a prior life, in the pre-web world, I wrote three books on hypermedia; I tend to follow this area with some interest).

Winer’s sub-text poses a problem for anyone who uses a piece of his prior art—RSS. While he’s added a new element,

in his RSS feed, nothing can yet read it. It should be simple for the RSS readers to support it; it’s valid Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML; yet another Winer concoction). “The source has all the text,” Winer writes. “Of course there aren’t any apps that read this format, yet. It’s always that way. When I first came out with the predecessor to RSS, no one read it. But eventually someone did, and then a lot of people, etc etc.” Is Winer cannibalizing RSS, or is he merely giving it a much-needed kick in the butt? My money’s on the latter. Winer’s first software interest—and first great success (oh, how I pine for ThinkTank and MORE)—is outliners. It shows with sub-text. I’m hoping this evolves into a full-blown outline processor for the web, and I believe that’s where Winer is headed. In another article he refers to sub-text as “a simple sub-case of outline-based browsing.” I’m not quite sure how I feel about sub-text yet—sub-text feels like a hesitant first stumble—but you can bet your ass I’m paying attention. I can see a possible immediate use for sub-text in the weekly blotter round-up pieces I publish each weekend. ARTS & FARCES uses OmniOutliner Professional‘s interactive HTML export internally quite a lot—I manage all of my projects in OmniOutliner—and I’ve been experimenting with using it to do where I think Winer is headed with sub-text. OmniOutliner outputs HTML 4.01 transitional and employs about a page-and-a-half of Javascript. Seems like a perfect candidate for HTML5, CSS3, and a little less Javascript. But I think (hope) Winer wants to make the outline not just displayable but editable as well. {/if}

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