Word: hypertexts
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...music and books. If we can extrapolate from cybercave-wall stuff like Cyberswine, the next thousand years of storytelling will put us in the director's seat. The descendants of video games, interactive TV, online environments like MUDs and MOOs (where Net folks cavort in text-based worlds) and hypertext will vest the power to create in the viewers' hands...
...There is no popular need right now for multimedia. That's obvious," sighs Michael Joyce, the father of hypertext fiction--nonlinear storytelling in which plot lines unfold in different ways upon subsequent readings. Joyce, an associate professor of English at Vassar College, wrote the "classic" hypertext novel, afternoon, a story. The piece is told one screenful of text at a time; by clicking on adjectives and verbs, readers veer off in far-flung narrative directions. While this may sound like the same experience as following hypertext links around the World Wide Web, afternoon was written in 1987 and distributed...
Well, the Web itself is awfully big, but XML may render such breathless sentences prescient. Here's the pitch: Websites are built using markup languages--sets of rules for displaying information on a Web page. Today's standard language, HTML (hypertext markup language), was chosen at the dawn of the Web for its simplicity and the ease with which it combined pictures with plain text. This very simplicity, though, makes the Web in its current form a very tough place to do business...
Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to link CERN's resources by hypertext. He noted that in principle, these resources could be text, graphics, video, anything--a "hypermedia" system--and that eventually the system could go global. "This initial document didn't go down well," says Berners-Lee. But he persisted and won the indulgence of his boss, who okayed the purchase of a NeXT computer. Sitting on Berners-Lee's desk, it would become the first Web content "server," the first node in this global brain. In collaboration with colleagues, Berners-Lee developed the three technical keystones...
...idea of a global hypertext system had been championed since the 1960s by a visionary named Ted Nelson, who had pursued it as the "Xanadu" project. But Nelson wanted Xanadu to make a profit, and this vastly complicated the system, which never got off the ground. Berners-Lee, in contrast, persuaded CERN to let go of intellectual property to get the Web airborne. A no-frills browser was put in the public domain--downloadable to all comers, who could use it, love it, send it to friends and even improve...