Making links

[nmg]

Some years ago, back when I was in sixth form and trying to decide what I wanted to study at University, the BBC broadcast a Horizon documentary on novel interfaces for computers, which was presented by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The documentary presented a future information system in which you could follow links between documents, images and videos, with software "agents" that helped you find things. More than anything else, it was a novel documentary by itself; how better to show what a new information system might be like, than to film the documentary as if it were being presented by that information system.

The memory of this documentary, Hyperland, stayed with me, and was one of the reasons why I decided to read computer science rather than electronics (this book and this book were the other reasons). Moving forward a few years, I first came across the Web in the autumn of 1993, with the release of the Mosaic browser (I can still remember various of my contemporaries, possibly including evildespot and perdita_fysh, telling me that the Web wouldn't come to anything).

The early Web was quite exhilarating, but it still didn't live up to the promise of Hyperland. I graduated and moved to Cambridge. As I got more disillusioned with my employer (a certain large Scandinavian mobile telecoms company that isn't Ericsson), I spent more time reading academic papers on the subject of hypertext and agents. In order to get a better grounding in AI, I studied for my Masters in Edinburgh. After that, I looked around for PhD places, and found that the University of Southampton was the place to go in the UK if you wanted to do research on hypertext.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Comments

[evildespot.livejournal.com]

I hope I'm not being revisionist in saying that my complaint about it was when they added inline graphics, and like perdita, I said this would generate a huge waste of otherwise useful bandwidth. I stand by that, but in much the same way that Windows being a huge waste of CPU power has given us all supercomputers, the web has given us a super-internet which you means you can do the "useful" things even better than before. It's also become very useful itself, in parts. I don't think I ever said it would come to nothing, I think I said that it would be better if it did. I withdraw that now, because although it has caused lots of government interferance in Internet issues, popularisation of the Internet has been good for it, and for me. As I said, I hope I'm not trying to rewrite history, there, just because it would be a bit embarrassing :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

... says he, in the form of text with an inline image...

[evildespot.livejournal.com]

at least it's _of me_ :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Harrrumph.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Granted, but there are a lot of applications and interaction styles that you couldn't build if you didn't have non-textual inline content. There's also the question of causality; did the internet and computers become faster because webpages and applications got bigger, or does the growth in page and software size anticipate future improvements in the capabilities of the infrastructure. Discuss.

I'm playing devil's advocate though. We've (thankfully) got past the point where every website replaced <ul> with a series of coloured balls, which is a step forward, but the aesthetics of the web are still largely informed by those of print media. Even with CSS and XSLT, a lot of websites overuse inline images.