Tags: documents

Balisage: Metaphors We Code By

My talk, Building, was about the metaphors we use to talk about the work we do on the web. So I’m interested in this analysis of the metaphors used to talk about markup:

• Data is documents, processing data is clerking
• Data is trees, processing data is forestry
• Data is buildings, processing data is construction
• Data is a place, processing data is a journey
• Data is a fluid, processing data is plumbing
• Data is a textile, processing data is weaving
• Data is music, processing data is performing

The web is something different - daverupert.com

The web is so much bigger than the little boxes we try to put it in. The web is good at many things and not great (yet) at others. The web is a snowball rolling down hill, absorbing other technologies along the way. The web is an interactive window across space and time, a near instant connection to anyone on the planet. The web is something different. I wish we’d see the web more for itself, not defined by its nearest neighbor or navel-gazing over some hypothetical pathway we could have gone down decades ago.

A History of the Web in 100 Pages - Web Directions

I’m excited by this documentary project from John! The first video installment features three historic “pages”:

• As We May Think,
• Information Management: A Proposal, and
• the first web page.

NASA Collection

Back in 1985, Ian wrote to NASA to get some info for a shool project (that’s how it worked before the World Wide Web). NASA sent him a treaure trove in response. Here they are, scanned as PDFs. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and more.

Frank Chimero · Redesign: Wants and Needs

Websites sit on a design spectrum. On one end are applications, with their conditional logic, states, and flows—they’re software.

On the other end of the design spectrum are documents; sweet, modest documents with their pleasing knowableness and clear edges.

For better or worse, I am a document lover.

This is the context where I fell in love with design and the web. It is a love story, but it is also a ghost story.

A little while back, I showed Paul what I was working on with The Gęsiówka Story. I value his opinion and I really like the Bradshaw’s Guide project that he’s been working on. We’re both in complete agreement with Russell Davies’ call for an internet of unmonetisable enthusiasms. Call them side projects if you like, but for me, these are the things that the World Wide Web excels at.

These unomentisable enthusiasms/side projects are what got me hooked on the web in the first place. Fray.com—back when it was a website for personal stories—was what really made the web click for me. I had seen brochure sites, I had seen e-commerce sites, but it was seeing something built purely for the love of it that caused that lightbulb moment for me.

I told Paul about another site I remembered from that time (we’re talking about the mid-to-late nineties here). It was called Private Art. It was the work of one family, the children of Private Art Pranger who served in World War Two and wrote letters from the front. Without any expectations, I did a quick search, and amazingly, the site is still up!

Yes, it’s got tiled background images, and the framesetted content is in a pop-up window, but it works. The site hasn’t been updated for fifteen years but it works perfectly in a web browser today. That’s kind of amazing. We really shouldn’t take the longevity of our materials for granted. Could you imagine trying to open a word processing document from the late nineties on your computer today? You’d have a bad time.

Working on The Gęsiówka Story helped to remind me of some of the things that made me fall in love with the web in the first place. What I wrote about it is equally true of Private Art:

When we talk about documents on the web, we usually use the word “document” as a noun. But working on The Gęsiówka Story, I came to think of the word “document” as a verb.

The World Wide Web is a medium that’s works for quick, short-term lightweight bits of fun and also for long-term, deeper, slower, thoughtful archives of our collective culture.

The web is a many-splendoured thing.

Colour Wheels, Charts, and Tables Through History – The Public Domain Review

These are beautiful!

Featured below is a chronology of various attempts through the last four centuries to visually organise and make sense of colour.

XML is 20

XML 1.0 was released on February 10th, 1998. I remember the hype around XML at the time—it was our saviour, the chosen one, prophesied to bring balance to data exchange. Things didn’t quite work out that way, but still…

Twenty years later, it seems obvious that the most important thing about XML is that it was the first. The first data format that anyone could pack anything up into, send across the network to anywhere, and unpack on the other end, without asking anyone’s permission or paying for software, or for the receiver to have to pay attention to what the producer thought they’d produced it for or what it meant.

In an excellent piece called The First Web Apps: 5 Apps That Shaped the Internet as We Know It, Matthew Guay wrote:

The world wide web wasn’t supposed to be this fun. Berners-Lee imagined the internet as a place to collaborate around text, somewhere to share research data and thesis papers.

In his somewhat confused talk at FFConf this year, James Kyle said:

The web was designed to share documents.

Douglas Crockford said

The web was not designed to do any of things it is doing. It was intended to be a simple—even primitive—document retrieval system.

Some rando on Hacker News declared:

Essentially every single aspect of the web is terrible. It was designed as a static document presentation system with hyperlinks.

It appears to be a universally accepted truth. The web was designed for sharing documents, and was never meant for the kind of applications we can build these days.

I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it’s fairer to say that the first use case for the web was document retrieval. And yes, that initial use case certainly influenced the first iteration of HTML. But right from the start, the vision for the web wasn’t constrained by what it was being asked to do at the time. (I mean, if you need an example of vision, Tim Berners-Lee called it the World Wide Web when it was just on one computer!)

The original people working on the web—Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, Jean-Francois Groff, etc.—didn’t to try define the edges of what the web would be capable of. Quite the opposite. All of them really wanted a more interactive read-write web where documents could not only be read, but also edited and updated.

As for the idea of having a programming language in browsers (as well as a markup language), Tim Berners-Lee was all for it …as long as it could be truly ubiquitous.

To say that the web was made for sharing documents is like saying that the internet was made for email. It’s true in the sense that it was the most popular use case, but that never defined the limits of the system.

The secret sauce of the internet lies in its flexibility—it’s a deliberately dumb network that doesn’t care about the specifics of what runs on it. This lesson was then passed on to the web—another deliberately simple system designed to be agnostic to use cases.

It’s true that the web of today is very, very different to its initial incarnation. We got CSS; we got JavaScript; HTML has evolved; HTTP has evolved; URLs have …well, cool URIs don’t change, but you get the idea. The web is like the ship of Theseus—so much of it has been changed and added to over time. That doesn’t mean its initial design was flawed—just the opposite. It means that its initial design wasn’t unnecessarily rigid. The simplicity of the early web wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.

The web (like the internet upon which it runs) was designed to be flexible, and to adjust to future use-cases that couldn’t be predicted in advance. The best proof of this flexibility is the fact that we can and do now build rich interactive applications on the World Wide Web. If the web had truly been designed only for documents, that wouldn’t be possible.

In preparing for my talk for the Bamboo Juice conference at the Eden Project in Cornwall next week, I find I’m doing a lot of WWILFing. After spending far too long reading about Stanford Tori and Bernal Spheres, and editing footage of a Von Braun-inspired orbital habitat, I got completely sidetracked into trying to figure out the storage capacity of the gold-plated record attached to Voyager 1.

I still haven’t found an answer—I’ve asked Voyager’s cousin for help—but I did stumble across a gem of a document from 1995. It’s by Simon Pockley and it’s called Lest We Forget or Why I chose the World Wide Web as a repository for archival material. Written in the infancy of the web, it makes for fascinating reading. It’s like a seedling of the semantic web. Some of the projections were way off but some of them were eerily prescient. Here’s my favourite passage:

Technological obsolescence is only a part of the problem in the preservation of digital information. The World Wide Web is a flexible carrier of digital material across both hardware and software. Its ability to disseminate this material globally, combined with its inherent flexibility, allow it to accommodate evolving standards of encoding and markup. Survival of significant material on-line is dependent on use and use is related to ease of access.

The document contains a number of hyperlinks to related material, all of which are collected into footnotes at the end. What’s heartbreaking is to discover how many of those links no longer resolve. Just a handful from the original list remain:

• Preserving Digital Objects: Recurrent Needs and Challenges by Michael Lesk
• From Digital Artefact to Digital Object by Ross Harvey
• Preservation Roles and Responsibilities of Collecting Institutions in the Digital Age by Maggie Jones
• Long-Term Management Issues in the Preservation of Electronic Information by Maggie Exon
• Culture and Cultural Memory: Challenges of an Electronic Era by Eric Wainwright

Four fifths of those links resolve to a single domain, that of the National Library of Australia. So much for our distributed repository of archival material.

Flickr: The New Frontiersman's Photostream

Background material for Watchmen.