Copyright © 1996 Xerox Corporation
It's truly an honor to be invited to give this keynote. Even though my involvement in hypermedia has ebbed and flowed over the years, I've always felt an ongoing commonality with this community and its goals. To give you one example, I've been impressed and pleased ever since the 1987 Chapel Hill conference at the continuing active participation and interchange of two groups Frank Halasz called the "engineers" and the "literati." This is not to say that we've always completely understood each other, but over the years, we've pushed and pulled across that "boundary" - strengthening and deepening the work of both sides. A brilliant example is Jim Rosenberg's groundbreaking theoretical work on structuring and composites, which is in part informed by the innovative structures of hypertext fiction and poetry, like his own Intergrams.[1] This bridging has always felt wonderfully appropriate for a field whose primary concern is linking. So there's a first sense of integration that we've been involved in for years. |
I'll start with a brief and "coarse" history of hypermedia
systems. This will point to how I'm going to be using the term
"integration," and set up a very current example to show just how
controversial and political these issues can get.
Then I'll present a brief "guided tour" through the hypermedia systems I've been associated with over the years. This will get my biases and prejudices about integration on the table and into a historical context. Next, in the "reflections" part of the talk, I'll revisit Frank Halasz's landmark keynote at the HT'91 conference. Those of you who were there remember how aptly he captured the state of the field. I think you'll also see how prescient that talk was, and how relevant the issues continue to be today. Finally, I'll issue a few exhortations - some integration perspectives we ought to be pursuing today. |
Here is a collection of some of the senses of integration that have played a key role in our work at different times and in different ways. Some of these have received lots of attention, others maybe need a bit more. (For example, I've had some fun chats with Cathy Marshall about linking across the offline/online boundary, an area we might consider investigating deeper.) I'm sure you can add your own senses of integration to this list. |
Here's the home page for a "feature" of the latest Netscape
Navigator web browser, support for email services.[2] Let me read you the
opening lines:
"Do I really need another mail server? If you're like most companies you probably have at least one or even several mail systems already. In fact, you probably have at least several different vendors' mail solutions. So why should you purchase a Netscape Mail Server and add another one?" My questions exactly! Is this a step forward? |
Now, we've had support for sending email from web browsers for awhile - there's a "mailto" protocol that embeds this in html link tags. But email browsing and management is a whole different kettle of fish. There are good programs based on years of iterative development. I'm a fan of Eudora myself which integrates rather well with the web. I can "command-click" on a URL in an email message on my mac, to cause Netscape to display that page. Sure, Netscape 2.0 lets you render html in the message. But unless you think HTML ought to be the replacement for ascii, this basically saves one key click. |
I want to use this example to raise a few hard questions about
integration. For example, whose interests are best being served
here? Imagine an alternative where Netscape and Qualcomm (producers of Eudora)
form
an alliance, leaving each responsible for what it does best. After all,
we do see such alliances. Has someone at Netscape decided that the
battle with Microsoft is better served through "colonizing" more of
the desktop, in effect returning to monolithic agendas?
But we need to be very careful about casting stones here. First, I know I'm not alone in worrying about the alternative if Netscape loses the battle with Miscrosoft. But more importantly, the question of how best to support integration is hard. Clearly the standards and infrastructure have to be in place before smooth "boundary crossings" can succeed. Here's where work done in this community has so much to offer. Witness for example, the exciting open hypermedia systems workshop that took place earlier at this conference. I only hope the Microsofts and Netscapes of the world are listening. |
Now I'd like to follow the thread of integration at a more personal level. Some of you may be surprised (and relieved!) to see that Dexter isn't on this timeline.[3] It's not a system, but still had a big influence on my research and turned out to be extremely valuable for work in integration. After all, Dexter itself was an overt attempt to integrate the experiences of the foremost hypermedia systems of the late 1980's. |
I've gotten a bit of a reputation for having been the first to get a
Ph.D. in hypertext.[4] But some of my
colleagues used to correct me,
saying I was the first to "get away with it"!
In looking back, I think two integration goals were at the heart of my thesis. One came from having been inspired by Ted Nelson's vision of Xanadu in his classic text, Computer Lib, and by Doug Engelbart's Augment project. I thought what was needed was an approach that integrated both styles of interconnecting information. At the same time, I was intrigued by the "CSCW" side of Vannevar Bush's vision - how scientists and academics distributed across networks could work together, commenting on and critiquing each others writings. Though these two endeavors wound up taking up most of my thesis, there was one chapter in between that formed the glue between them, and is the only part of my thesis that I'm still asked about today. |
I had decided that hypertext links needed "types" (really
"labels") that could distinguish in what way the link was serving
either as a traversible connection, a structuring means, or an
argument representation. Within each of these, I mapped out a finer-grained
semantics. Based on a study of published articles and peer
commentaries, here was my proposal for link types in support of
critique.
As it turned out, the most important issue raised by my thesis was how a link mechanism could integrate representation of relatiohnships, structure, and traversal. One more point about my thesis that is especially interesting today: The chapter on link types was required at the end by the outside member of my committee, Dagobert Soergel, a professor from the College of Library and Information Services at the University of Maryland. In those days, "digital libraries" were the focus of study by Dagobert and others, but they had to wait just as long as we for the rest of the world to finally catch on. I'll return to the issue of learning from librarians later on. |
Coming to Xerox in 1984 was in many ways like meeting old friends. We hadn't known about each others' work, but NoteCards development had followed many of the same goals.[5] Fileboxes were a link-based hierarchical structuring mechanism, showing that links could marry both structuring styles, though we later came to see that this was a mistake.[6] NoteCards also had link types, though rather than predefined sets for particular applications, there were only a few built-in together with support for user definition. Later when we built the "programmer's interface," functionality could be associated with these link types. |
One day we got the idea to treat all the notefiles we could get
our hands on as a kind of "data" and gather some statistics. Here is
the list of all the link types we found that people had created. It's a
fascinating collection - and I'm sorry we didn't look much harder at
them while we still had access to their creators and contexts.
"Link types" have come a long way since then, forming a piece of what George Landow called the "rhetoric of hypertext."[7] But the question of tailorable versus standard semantics is still relevant today. |
Another study conducted by Melissa Monty revealed important aspects of the way our hypertext interface was engineered.[8] Her warnings against forcing "premature" atomization, filing and the like, led us not only to support different styles, but also to allow for smooth movement between them. |
Frank Halasz said in 1991 that "Happiness is Notecards in the rearview mirror." Indeed, his critique of NoteCards identified vital issues for the field (a few of which we'll get to later). But in thinking about the positive side of what we accomplished, I think first of our users, a motley crew that were crucially "out of our hands." Here's an example of how we learned from a user about a rich sense of versioning, what we might call "chronological" integration.[9] This is a tiny piece of a NoteCards user's thesis notefile. When he explained to Peggy Irish and me what he was up to, he started from these two outlines - the "old" and the "new." But those terms had a relative meaning at best. Both outlines had been around for awhile and would persist usefully for some time to come. The "transition" phase between them ended up comprising much of his thesis work. Even if we could have provided automated support for "restructuring" his hypertext world, he wouldn't have wanted it. In fact, one of the things he liked best about NoteCards was the way it let him live simultaneoulsy coming out of the old and into the new. Here's hypermedia at its best - overlapping structures supporting multiple views. This suggests defining the goal of integration as supporting work that "rides" some boundary or transition - supporting change, but at its own pace. |
Jeremy Roschelle and I worked on a system meant to offer better integration across multiple media, in particular, video.[10] Here on the left, you may be able to see the shaded scroll bar "thumb" that moved down the timeline as the video played. The boxes are what our users called "landmines," link anchors that, when encountered, automatically brought up their destinations, say, a bit of transcript or graphic explanation for a piece of video. The anchors had duration; each window would close as the thumb fell off the other end of its landmine. |
Like any self-respecting hypermedia researcher receiving a challenge like that, I ran away. In fact, I left the country. But of course, there is no escape. There on the other side of the ocean in a city called Aarhus, Kaj Grønbæk and his colleagues were running into the same problem. This time we agreed to take it up as a central driving design goal (as were the Microcosm folks at Southampton among others). Kaj's studies of engineering work at Great Belt had shown an overriding need for linking across diverse third-party applications as well as a need for support for multiple platforms.[11] Integration agendas were the order of the day. We chose Dexter as the basis of our framework,[12] but that's another story. |
Recently along with many of the folks in this room, we've begun worrying about WWW integration and all the infrastructural, networked, decentralized issues it raises. I think we have a ways to go before we get deep integration that will let us "ride" the boundary between local and world-wide hypertexts.[13] |
Some of you remember two earlier conferences at which Frank Halasz voiced some strong, provocative closing words, in 1987 where the result was his "Seven Issues" paper, and in 1991 when he revisited that analysis.[14] Who knows, perhaps we should revisit Frank's issues again in five years to see what they might have to say about the next millenium. |
Now it's incredibly hard to refrain from talking about every one
of Frank's issues. Looking back in preparing this talk, they each
spoke volumes in today's WWW world. Realizing that not all of you
have those b&w copies of his slides handed out at the end of HT'91, I
got Frank's approval to put them up on the web, along with a
transcript of the talk made by John Leggett and Cindy Kunz at Texas A&M
University
(http://www.parc.xerox.com/halasz-keynote).
I can only look briefly at three of Frank's issues here. Please do check out the rest yourself. |
The first issue that jumped out at me was, "Very large hypertexts" remembering that the WWW hadn't taken off then. Here, Frank named the "barriers" to hypertexts bigger than 10K nodes. All quite reasonable issues when you look back at them. So what happened? People have big disorientation problems on the web. Until very recently (with WYSIWYG editors like Adobe Page Mill) document input and link creation is painful. Privacy has only recently been addressed. Heterogeneity amounts to HTML plus a few image formats. Could it be that the success of the WWW is due to the resolution of the other two problems - addressing the problem of scale by means of the already installed base of internet users, and the resolving of LAN/WAN issues by enabling TCP at the personal workstation? Judge for yourself, I suspect that Tim Berners-Lee's focus on a particular group of users and their needs helped alot - as did some adept politicking on his part. And let's give credit to the power of links even as impoverished as embedded "goto's" are. WWW as distributed HyperCard? |
No, the problem isn't that we're preoccupied with links, it's that we have lost track of structure! HTML is flat inside pages, and across pages there is no explicit representations of higher order structures. Fortunately there's hope on the horizon with projects like Hyper-G and DynaWeb's attempts to bring SGML to the web. It's ironic - Frank probably never expected the WWW to take up computed links and virtual structures, but leave behind composites! |
Alright, here's the moment where you get to ask what in the
world all this history and looking back can say for what we should be
doing now. Certainly, we need to bring structure to the web. Keith Instone's
workshop on hypermedia
research and the WWW at this conference is a first step in that direction.
What else? Well, here are three of my personal exhortations. First, just to recapitulate, I think we need to look back at our own field for ideas that could influence current developments. Bush, Nelson, and Engelbart have gotten well-deserved attention over the years, but there are other long-lasting and significant projects in our field. To pick just one example, I'd recommend ZOG/KMS - many of their earlier ideas including their provocative UI perspectives are quite relevant today.[15] Second, I recommend doing more of what we've long shown a talent for - looking to other fields for inspiration. Here, I will plug the cross-fertilization that is happening with digital library work. Finally, I want to exhort you toward a somewhat different kind of integration involving community building. |
Here, I'm drawing on recent work by David Levy, a colleague at Xerox PARC and a name known to some of you from the Digital Libraries conferences. He has been studying cataloging in a particularly engaged way. His sources include histories, textbooks, and ongoing "live" debates. From these, he's starting to develop recommendations for the value and potential role cataloging could have on the web.[16] |
David characterizes the work of catalogers generally as maintaining stability and controlling variability.[17] Moreover, they participate in defining the bounds of variability. Better understandings of cataloging will surely have implications for the development of URNs, URCs and the like. But I want to pick up another of David's threads, what the catalogers call "finding aids." |
Long used by the archival community, these remind me a bit of hypermedia "guided tours."[18] Used to describe large stable document collections, they have both a structured and a narrative quality. A researcher at Berkeley, David Pitti, has designed a structured SGML representation for finding aids which he is proposing be adopted as a web standard. |
Here, have a look at Pitti's web pages. One of the nice features is that his structures can be browsed with standard non-SGML enhanced web browsers, thanks to on-the-fly translation by DynaWeb. As I learned from the inserts in our conference packet, our own Steve de Rose deserves much of the credit here. |
Here is a view of "Series 5," a bunch of containers holding the center's news clipping collection. Notice the structure labeled "where you are" captured at the top of the page. |
If you do a search, the hits are represented "in context" very much in the Sup erBook style. For example, there are three hits on "contragate" in Series 5. Clicking on the link shows us pages marked up with hits, again in context. The feeling is one of smooth transparent access - one does familiar sorts of searches, but structure is a resource and is represented as appropriate. |
Meanwhile the task force had gotten hold of some disk space on the city's host machine and put up web pages to keep their new found supporters informed of the progress of the negotiations. Over the last nine months, a wealth of materials have appeared there including reports like this one of another meeting. |
As Cathy Marshall said earlier this week, we're on the web alright, but we're still very much "in the box." Perhaps broadening our perspective from linking to integration in all its rich variety can pull us now and then out of the box and into the world. |
One last shameless plug: If you're interested in learning more about "communication" perspectives on the web (and many other important issues), check out Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, an organization that offers an alternative point of view to those of the sometimes overwhelming commercial interests that surround us and our work. |