From: "Bill Bearden" <BBearden@BCL.net>
We have a basic User Interface (UI) issue to solve which goes a little
beyond what Henry brings up. But I think the solution to the UI problem will
also address Henry's issue.
In HTML, we only get one-way, one-thing links. With XML, we have a much more
powerful form of hyperlink. In XML, we can create links between a word in
our data (could be a document) and many other things (multi-way,
multi-thing). This means we can no longer expect the simple single-click to
take us where we want to go.
I suggest that we use the "mouseover" UI technique to expose links. When the
user rests the mouse pointer on a word, they will see a list of links from
which to choose. Perhaps the first thing they see in the list is not a link
at all, but a contextual definition of the word (or phrase) if one exists.
A standard UI technique for this may already have been decided on. I'm new
to XML so I don't know. But it seems obvious that something will have to be
done. Everything will be "hot" in future applications*: every word, every
piece of data. And not all of the links will be derived from the data's
source. Our personal servers will process the datastream and add links (or
take them away) before the data gets to our UI. Whether it is done by some
"webby" (WBI) agent or one of Douglas' virtual terminal server processes,
eventually it will be done.
Bill
*It is one of my pet peeves that users today can click on a part number in a
spreadsheet and go straight into the Inventory or Purchasing application to
view other data about that part. Spreadsheets generally have no clue what
you are typing into them. When "everything is hot", this will be possible. I
believe we may also need a completely new UI platform to support this type
of environment. This gets back to my rant about computing systems supporting
what people do. For instance, people name things. The system should
recognize the named object in every process.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: vaneyken@sympatico.ca [mailto:vaneyken@sympatico.ca]
> Sent: Friday, February 18, 2000 8:45 AM
> To: unrev-II@onelist.com
> Subject: [unrev-II] Implicit hyperlinks
>
>
> From: vaneyken@sympatico.ca
>
> Just a thought that crossed my mind as am reading rather
> specialized documents
> outside my more ordinary areas of interest (such as the bootstrap docs):
>
> One often encounters unfamiliar terms, or terms defined within a
> specialty
> somewhat different than one is used to (i.q. the abbreviation IQ
> in bootstrap
<<snip>>
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