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Chapter 16 Introduction |
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In July 1945, Vannevar Bush, President Franklin Roosevelt's Science Adviser, wrote a provocative article (Bush, 1945) offering his vision of science projects that might become feasible in the post-World War II period. He wisely identified the information-overload problem and sought to make cross-references within and across documents easy to create and traverse. His desktop information-exploration tool, memex, was based on microfilm and eye-tracking technology. Memex would enable readers to follow cross-references by merely staring at them:
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his addition to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. (Bush, 1945)
It has taken 50 years to create effective-although somewhat revised-models
of Bush's vision. Now the technology is beginning to make possible a useful
reading, browsing, linking, and annotating environment to support communal
nonlinear writing and reading. The name hypertext, or hypermedia,
has been applied to networks of nodes (also called articles, documents,
files, cards, pages, frames, screens) containing information (in text, graphics,
video, sound, etc.) that are connected by links (also called cross-references,
citations). Hypertext is more commonly applied to text-only applications,
whereas hypermedia is used to convey the inclusion of other media, especially
sound and video. The World Wide Web extends the hypermedia to a vast network
of computers in which millions of users can create and retrieve multimedia
materials from around the world in seconds.
Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext in the 1960s as he was writing
about his universal library and docuverse with stretch text
that expands when selected. Nelson's enthusiasm and imagination infected
many who shared his computopian hopes. Using less psychedelic terms,
Douglas Engelbart created his Human Augmentation system at Stanford Research
Institute during the 1960s with hypertext point-and-click features, expanding
outline processors, multiple windows, remote collaboration, and the mouse
(Engelbart, 1984). In parallel, Andries van Dam developed early electronic
books at Brown University using colorful dynamic graphics and three-dimensional
animation (Yankelovich et al., 1985; van Dam, 1988).
By the mid-1980s, many research and commercial packages offered hypertext
features to enable convenient jumps among articles (Conklin, 1987; Halasz,
1988; Shneiderman and Kearsley, 1989; Nielsen, 1995). Pioneering hypertext
systems include NoteCards developed at Xerox PARC, KMS from Knowledge Systems,
Inc., Guide from OWL International, and our Hyperties system, now marketed
and expanded by Cognetics Corp. (Shneiderman, 1989) (Figure 16.3ap;e
and Color Plate 5). Since our model was a publication system with thousands
of readers for each writer, Hyperties has separate tools for browsing and
authoring documents. We chose a simple metaphor of a book made of a collection
of titled articles. There were author-generated and alphabetical tables
of contents, history lists supporting reversible actions, and no error messages.
The key innovation, in 1983, of having highlighted link words embedded in
the text (Koved and Shneiderman, 1986) was copied by others and became a
user interface component of the enormously successful World Wide Web (Berners-Lee,
1994). With a simple mouse click, users can jump to related web pages which
may be delivered from millions of server computers located around the world.
With graphics, maps, photos, and the increasing degree of animation supplied
by Java scripts, the environment is limited only by the bandwidth of the
network and the imagination of web page designers.
In 1987, Apple provided Bill Atkinson's HyperCard system free with every
Macintosh. Although the brochures referred to Vannevar Bush's vision, Apple
refrained from using the term hypertext in describing HyperCard (Figure
16.2ap;d). Building on the metaphor of cards arranged in stacks, Apple
claimed in the online help that "you can use HyperCard to create your
own applications for gathering, organizing, presenting, searching and customizing
information."
This chapter covers hypermedia concepts for design of multimedia documents
on personal computers and then expands to cover the design of websites for
the information-abundant World Wide Web.
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Last Updated: 11 December 2002 |