…etwork as a reading experience. “Hypertext books,” online books which are made up of an abundance of interlinked HTML pages, are mostly unpopular. The failure of this experiment is, in my opinion, very revealing.

Tinderbox map of a portion of…

I just don’t think you can say this is true in a world where Wikipedia exists. Sure, “[facts] are only rendered meaningful within narratives”, and linear narratives are the digestible ones, but non-linear structures enable the reader to construct a narrative via the linear encounter they have with the text. (Naturally, my supporting citation here is going to be “Taft in a wet t-shirt contest”.)

If I want to be a different kind of insufferable about this, I could say a (linear) path is necessarily created in the traversal of a graph.

… be part a cohesive worldview? Normally people solve this by simply block quoting themselves, but this is a waste of an opportunity. The indented block quote is a print medium invention almost as old as typesetting. The block quote is plaintext, it is not actually linked to the original text or its context. I’ve been experimenting with one idea for a solution, and if you’ve read the last couple blog posts you’ll have seen it there. My stab at an answer is an iframe which shows the quote within its original context and gives a hint at its surroundings. Effectively, it’s a transclusion within my own blog. I’m currently satisfied with wha…

I believe very firmly that this is the Correct way of doing such a thing. All the hairs on my arms stand up – in a good way – at the iframe being returned to semantic use1. Remember when people would switch between applications by rotating a cube where the display was on a side? Spatial metaphors, y’all. Let’s make windows into other pages to look into their content! The browser allows ‘er!

Am I too excited about this when I’m pretty sure I don’t have a usecase? Very possibly. The networking of my thought is much more in my personal wiki, which is all private and uses context around backlinks, etc. etc. But man do I want to see people use this.

…here you want to cite yourself <em>To quote yourself, you’ll need to create an <a> anchor tag in the markdown file for the post you want to quote. If you wish to highlight a specific piece of text, instead create a <span></span> around the section you want to quote. Note that this can only be on your own website—it doesn’t work cross domain.</em> Here’s what it looks like for …

Boy, we of the Markdown persuasion sure do have some catching up to do with the outliners where this kind of thing is concerned… Damn you, anchors!!

Also, damn you, cross domain security.

  1. And not, just, like, Twitter embeds. ↩