(2024-12-30) Obenauer Ln040 The Venerable Hyperlink

Alexander Obenauer on LN 040 venerable hyperlink. Earlier this year, I published OLLOS, an experiment in which all of the things in my digital life are organized into one long timeline. There’s an important benefit of this arrangement: things are naturally grouped with other things that were created, or that happened, around the same time. This implicit association matches one that runs deep in how we structure our memories and plans of things along the self-organizing dimension.

But quite often, things are associated with other things found elsewhere in the timeline. OLLOS has some ways of linking items to other items, regardless of the items’ types, sources, or placements on the timeline. One of the easiest ways to create a link is to “reply” to one or more items when creating a new one. (associative)

This made OLLOS more powerful in some interesting ways. Since the linking system is agnostic to items’ types and sources, new item types could be introduced and linked in with all other items. Anything you add to your system becomes an OS-level primitive you can use with anything else

Since their invention in ancient Egypt, humanity has stored its recorded information and texts on scrolls: long sheets of parchment rolled up for easy storage, transportation, and safe-keeping.

Over the course of centuries, we moved to the codex: many individual sheets of paper bound together. The latter allowed for random access to information within, given that an index was provided

Hypertext, coined by Ted Nelson and demonstrated in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart during “The Mother of All Demos”, changed all that: now humanity’s information could be written in separate documents, and these documents could “link” to one another.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, he was keen on finding ways to make storage in linked graphs available to more people, over the tree-shaped filesystems of the day

But we largely don’t get this benefit in personal computing; we don’t or can’t store our stuff by linking personal information like contacts

There are some lovely counter-examples. For decades, personal wikis have given people the ability to build out information graphs, and have enjoyed something of a cult following.

Past systems often gestured at these ideas, sometimes with potency: Apple’s HyperCard featured cards in which users could add buttons which navigated to other cards. The functionality was there, but from my understanding 35 years on, the right affordances / ergonomics were not (of course, it’s important to note that HyperCard predates the World Wide Web, HTML, and so forth).

Little glimpses in modern OSs are almost always welcome surprises: the contact card you can open from a messages chat; the meeting link in a calendar event; or even simply linking to a webpage from an email, or a document hosted online. Most recently, Apple added reminders to the calendar.

When things are nicely integrated across apps, it often feels like magic — but only because we’ve structured operating systems in such a way that each individual integration across apps must be custom-built for each case.

Linking together versions across time is also poorly supported. When you do have versions, they’re often somewhere else

Alan Kay has talked about how the personal computer should work like the Internet: lots of independent programs passing around messages. Similarly, I wish the interfaces on the OS were like the World Wide Web: riddled with tons of links. Everything has a URL or unique identifier, and anything can link to anything else.