{"id":154,"date":"2009-03-02T09:04:31","date_gmt":"2009-03-02T17:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=154"},"modified":"2009-03-09T23:45:22","modified_gmt":"2009-03-10T06:45:22","slug":"hypertext-interaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=154","title":{"rendered":"Hypertext interaction"},"content":{"rendered":"

The upcoming CHI 2009<\/a> conference will be the 20th consecutive CHI I have attended.\u00a0 My first CHI was in 1990<\/a>, where I discovered the field of Human-Computer interaction, a term I had not come across in my undergraduate education as an electrical engineer.<\/p>\n

One of the most memorable experiences at CHI was a tutorial on “Hypertext” taught by Bob Glushko<\/a>. The concept was fascinating, and Bob was a good teacher. He did, however, say one thing that struck me as a challenge. He talked about nodes, links, and anchors, and said that to build hypertext systems, you needed a “graphics display and a mouse.” At the time, I was working at UCLA in the Office of Academic Computing (OAC) as a consultant and programmer. UCLA was an IBM shop, and we had a bunch of 24×80 green-on-black IBM 3178 (and equivalent) terminals. No mouse, no windows, no graphics. But we had something called ISPF<\/a>, which allowed the program to read the cursor location on the screen, and VSAM<\/a> with which I built a crude inverted index of our local online help.<\/p>\n

The help files had useful information, but no a good way for users to get at it.\u00a0 Challenged by Bob’s statements,\u00a0 I put together a program that allowed users to select a document, read it, move the cursor under any word on the screen, press enter, and cause the system to retrieve all documents that contained that word. The process could continue indefinitely. (No, there wasn’t a “back” button!)<\/p>\n

So was this a hypertext? There were certainly nodes, but no a priori<\/em> links, and no anchors. And yet the interaction style was in the right spirit: users could select an object’s proxy (a keyword, in my case), and having followed a one-to-many link, would arrive at a document. In subsequent years, I built several other hypertext systems that skipped the traditional node-link structure to focus on interaction with (and within) documents. Each of these dynamic hypertext<\/em> systems, in their own way, captured the spirit of hypertext while rejecting the static node-link paradigm.<\/p>\n