#hypertext

Historically, we could link to a certain part of the page only if that part had an ID. All we needed to do was to link to the URL and add the document fragment (ID). If we wanted to link to a certain part of the page, we needed to anchor that part to link to it. This was until we were blessed with the Text fragments!

Last November, I blogged about a few new features on NYTimes.com. Today we’re releasing an update to one of those features, which I’ve been calling “Emphasis”: paragraph-specific anchor links and the ability to highlight text in articles and blog posts.

Emphasis provides dynamic paragraph-specific anchor links and the ability to highlight text in a document, all of which is made available in the URL hash so it can be emailed, bookmarked, or shared.

Very interesting look into design decisions behind Tinderbox and how they relate to hypertext overall.

"I made tea."

"What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the notion that hypertext is a constraint? In other words, if the engine of application state (and hence the API) is not being driven by hypertext, then it cannot be RESTful and cannot be a REST API. Period. Is there some broken manual somewhere that needs to be fixed?"

"Consider Coover Links — links in which the start of a sentence lies in one side of the link while the end of the sentence lies at the other. Coover links are named for Robert Coover, the author of a short hypertext “Heart Suit” (McSweeney’s 16, 2005) written entirely in this fashion."

"Douglas Engelbart's whirling vision of the future; it was the first public use of a mouse, as well as examples of cutting, copying, pasting, teleconferencing, video conferencing, email, and... hypertext. It's just too damn much for 1968!"

"At a symposium in West Virginia, Nick Montfort asked Ted Nelson to describe a few programs that "could be used to enlarge the mind and liberate people""

"I have no idea exactly what "hotlinking" is. ... I think I may safely claim some expertise in this area — more expertise in the literature, I think, than any US or British judge currently possesses. So the passage is probably nonsense."

"What if you could have digressions and concise style in the same document?"

"The real issue is: how improve on conventional space?"

"Purple Include works on the iPhone!"

"Ever since Gamer Theory we've been thinking about how to design social environments for texts that aren't as conveniently hyper-structured as McKenzie Wark's."

"Information triage is the process of sorting through relevant materials, and organizing them to meet the needs of the task at hand."