Douglas Engelbart's HyperScope 1.0 Launched

ReadWriteWeb writes, "HyperScope 1.0 is a new Web app based on Douglas Engelbart's 1968 NLS/Augment (oNLine System). Engelbart and team have been working on Hyperscope since March of this year in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Its aim is to rebuild portions of Engelbart's NLS, on the Web, using current Web technologies such as Ajax and DHTML. In effect it gives an advanced browsing experience, including classic hypertext features like indirect links and transclusions of remote pieces of other documents. HyperScope has been completely built with open source JavaScript toolkit Dojo — meaning that everything is done on the client-side."

Re:is this really a good idea?

[Qzukk]

If it takes you 10x longer to design the content and the person viewing the page can find what they want 10x faster then is it really a net gain?

What if two people find what they want 10x faster? (Other than what would really happen: companies would switch from 10 words on an ad-filled page to 5 words each?) There are generally more content consumers than creators, both in the general sense as well as in the case of just about any field.

People are strange...

[pianoben]

I'm surprised that the man who spearheaded the development of the mouse would produce such an unnavigable system; you can't even scroll down with the arrow keys! Of course, in his vision, you're using a mouse and a 5-key chording keyboard; no third hand seems to be available for said arrow keys. But to not enable the scroll wheel, either?! No, thanks...

Re:So let me get this straight....

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's basically the same as the "New Discussion System" which is currently being tested right here on Slashdot?

Re:How does it compare to Xanadu?

[Eideewt]

Existing seems to be HyperScope's big advantage.

Enough with the snide remarks....

[FlyingGuy]

Ohh wait this IS> /. after all...

Now here's something we hope you'll really like!

Its seems to me that its time for a major shakeup in HTML. While CSS and other things make bold attempts at making the WWW usefull for something other then very basic page display it does seem rather lacking.

Page inclusion based on simple tests! The machinations one has to go through to make what seems like an obvious feature like if(X=Y,this.html,that.html) actualy happen require scripting and all sorts of PHP like occurances, java, javascript and what have you.

CSS gets ever more complex to simply accomplish a text area on the rendered page.

So now the idea HyperScope gets trotted out from a dust filled closet. I can't really see how that is going to help matters rather then just muddy the waters even more.

Isn't it really time for a MAJOR overhaul of HTML and the HTTP protocol? HTML as it was created was sufficient for the basic exchange of information, formatting was limited and things worked fairly well. Microsoft came along and realized that this could be taken MUCH farther and started doing things their own way, which was good for them, not so good for everyone else and was properly derided for doing so in a uncooperative way. But was it really? I agree that MS did what they did out of pure self interest, but did they suggest these things to various committies only to have them shot down because it was MS centric only? I don't know the answer.

I for one think its time to just scratch HTML as it currently exists and scratch CSS right along with it, and come up with something that actualy works smoothly and works as designed!

Basic fundemental layout strategies like Areas, Menus, Images, scrolling, layers and all the primitives sould be part and parsle of an HTML-Like specifcation, not an add-on cludge like CSS. The specification for this should rightly be decided upon by the major browser venders and fully supported by all the web server vendors. It should be code modules written to the specification that are freely available to anyone who wants to link them into their rendering engine. Further more, they should be written in ANSI C and all supporting libraries are included also written in ANSI C.

Re:Moo

[Lars Arvestad]

Isn't this just an anchor tag on drugs? Just make it part of HTML 5.

I would actually like to see something like this in HTML. I have always found it a bit weak that you have to explicitly put anchors in your document to be able to jump there. Of course, I have not been clever enough to suggest an improvement or even voice my disapproval.

Some way of saying "fifth P element of this document" or "H1 element with text 'The Main Point'" should all be pretty easy to implement for a client program.

Re:Moo

[hey!]

http://foo/bar.opml#2

I think it has to do with how the reference is generated.

OPML is an XML standard for creating outlines. You use your favorite OPML outliner, dump it on the web, and suddenly you have a web version of the outline. OPML was not designed as a web standard; once you put an OPML document on the web, it immediately becomes obvious that every node in the outline ought to have some kind of address you can link to.

I'm not terribly thrilled by this approach, but something like it is necessary. I'd rather extend OPML so that every node has a UUID, as well as an optional human readable idea. That way you could cite the node as http://foo.bar.opml#dbcb7190-3d9b-11db-a98b-080020 0c9a66, even if the author did not think it worthy of a human generated ID. The advantage of this system would be that citations would be stable, even if users reorganize the outline. Which is kind of the point of outlining.