Web Modeling Language (WebML)

“Designing a data-intensive Web site amounts to specifying its characteristics in terms of various orthogonal abstractions, each captured by a distinct model. The structure, composition, navigation, and presentation models enable the description of read-only web sites. They can be extended to cope with the specification of content management and integration with external services, through the addition of operations, which can be defined and added to the hypertext model. They are invoked as a side effect of navigation and permit one to specify commonly found interaction patterns as data entry, personal data management, and shopping carts.” (About WebML.org)

A conversation with Alan Kay: Dynabook Revisited

“Literacy is not just about being able to read street signs or medicine labels. It means being able to deal in the world of ideas. In a democratic society you need people to be in conversational contact with the important ideas of the past and of the present, which means being able to read about them and write about them and talk about them. (…) Because the music is not inside the piano.” (Squeakland essays)

The 20th Anniversary of the Apple Macintosh Computer!

“On January 24, 1984 the personal computing movement was changed forever with the Superbowl launch of Apple’s Macintosh computer. While the graphical user interface, mouse, and bitmapped display+printing had been around for more than a decade, the Mac represented the first combining of these key innovations into a beautifully crafted package that an ordinary consumer could pick up and use in daily life. The Mac went on to spawn several revolutions including the ‘Desktop Publishing’ phenomenon of the 80s. This site is a special project of the DigiBarn Computer Museum to bring together some of the rarest artifacts relating to the Mac (many never seen online or published in any way). We will also pull together many materials that will give you an idea of where the Mac came from, predecessor systems, people and organizations, and where the Mac fits today in our evolutionary tree of visual computing.” (DigiBarn Computer Museum)

A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: A consideration of document persistence

“It is well established that Web documents are ephemeral in nature. The literature now suggests that some Web objects are more ephemeral than others. Some authors describe this in terms of a Web document half-life, others use terms like ‘linkrot’ or persistence. It may be that certain ‘classes’ of Web documents are more or less likely to persist than are others. This article is based upon an evaluation of the existing literature as well as a continuing study of a set of URLs first identified in late 1996. It finds that a static collection of general Web pages tends to ‘stabilize’ somewhat after it has ‘aged’. However ‘stable’ various collections may be, their instability nevertheless pose problems for various classes of users. Based on the literature, it also finds that the stability of more specialized Web document collections (legal, educational, scientific citations) vary according to specialization. This finding, in turn, may have implications both for those who employ Web citations and for those involved in Web document collection development.” (Wallace Koehler – Information Research 9.2)

Where our hypermedia really should go!

“There is something going on called XML. Which some say is HTML done right. I think that is a good description. A wrong thing done to absolute perfection. I have been on the mailing list of the XML linking committee. Which is endeavoring to create some kind of a specification or a standard for  hyper documents that will appropriately represent connected structure. My experience is reading convinces me further, as if I had not known already that I want nothing to do with it. What I am  doing continues in another direction.” (Ted NelsonEngelbart’s Colloquium: The Unfinished Revolution)

Metacognition, Distributed Cognition and Visual Design 

“Metacognition is associated with planning, monitoring, evaluating and repairing performance. Designers of elearning systems can improve the quality of their environments by explicitly structuring the visual and interactive display of learning contexts to facilitate metacognition. Typically page layout, navigational appearance, visual and interactivity design are not viewed as major factors in metacognition. This is because metacognition tends to be interpreted as a process in the head, rather than an interactive one. It is argued here, that cognition and metacognition are part of a continuum and that both are highly interactive.” (David Kirsh – Dept. of Cogsci, UCSD)

A Few Thoughts on Cognitive Overload

“Cognitive overload is a brute fact of modern life. It is not going to disappear. In almost every facet of our work life, and in more and more of our domestic life, the jobs we need to do and the activity spaces we have in which to perform those jobs are ecologies saturated with overload. As technology increases the omnipresence of information, both of the pushed and pulled sort, the consequence for the workplace, so far, is that we are more overwhelmed. There is little reason to suppose this trend to change.” (David Kirsh – Dept. of Cogsci, UCSD)

XForms Institute: Interactive XForms School

“Like XHTML, SVG, and RSS, XForms is an XML-based language written with tags that can be identified by surrounding angle brackets. (XML purists perfer to call these elements) Learning XForms is largely a matter of understanding what individual elements do, as well as how they interrelate. One difference is that XForms provides several more elements than form authors might be accustomed to. As a result, several tasks that would have otherwise required complicated scripting can be accomplished declaratively, just by putting the right elements in place.” (About XForms Institute)