Fri, Oct 14, 2005
Purple Numbers Are Ugly
#
EvanHenshawPlath
thinks that PurpleNumbers are ugly. He's not the first. (JW1)
A bit of history. The original PurpleNumbers were a dark purple.
Then MurrayAltheim came up with a brilliant idea. Let's make them
lighter! So he did. That was better, but it wasn't enough. (JW2)
As ChrisDent and I started taking the identifier scheme to the next
level, blogs started becoming popular. PermaLinks, as rabble and
others have pointed out, are granular addresses. Because our new
identifier scheme was uglier by design (universally unique IDs can get
quite large), we decided to jump on the blogging bandwagon and use
hashes instead. (JW3)
Then a funny thing happened. PeterYim, a long-time Engelbart follower
and an avid PurpleWiki user, complained. A lot. He said it was too
hard to figure out what the links were. And as much as I tried to
ignore him, I couldn't. He was right. Or, more accurately, we were
wrong. So we changed it back. (JW4)
Our decision to go with hashes was wrong specifically in the context
of PurpleWiki. Wikis are
wonderful because
you can LinkAsYouThink. This is possible because page names are
automatically linked, and it's easy to remember page names. We added
syntax for easily linking to PurpleNumbers (for example,
PurpleNumbers#G3). The problem was that when we replaced the
addresses with hashes, we made it harder to LinkAsYouThink. (JW5)
With WikiSym coming
up in a few days, I've had Wikis on my mind big-time, and I recently
had an epiphany. It turns out I was wrong about being wrong. (JW6)
The identifiers underlying PurpleNumbers are designed to be stable,
unique, and meaningless. In other words, not human-friendly. The
notion of linking to PurpleNumbers via our extended Wiki syntax isn't
tremendously useful, even if the identifiers are easily visible,
because they're impossible to remember. You're rarely going to
LinkAsYouThink, because you'll most likely have to go to the page to
check what the number is. If you're going to do that, you might as
well just cut-and-paste the link, the status quo of the web. (JW7)
PhilJones almost
stumbled onto something quite profound in his commentary last May,
but he couldn't quite put his finger on it, and Chris and I
consequently
jumped all over him. We were right, of course, but Phil was onto
something. (JW8)
In a Wiki context, here's the right way to use PurpleNumbers. By
default, PurpleNumbers should look pretty. So far, the best scheme
I've seen for this is SimonWillison's
nifty CSS hack.
If folks want to link to a PurpleNumber in a Wiki, they can do it the
way you do it anywhere else -- get the link address by clicking on the
number (or hash or paragraph symbol or whatever), and copy-and-paste
it into your document. (JW9)
However, the Wiki should add an additional feature: the ability to add
a human-friendly label to any paragraph. Some Wikis implement this
capability by using special WikiText tags, but you should be able to
implement this using AJAX goodness. (JWA)
In other words, suppose you're reading a Wiki page, and you find one
paragraph particularly compelling. All you do is click on the
paragraph and add your human-friendly tag. Let's say the page is
DeepThoughts and you enter the label
indeed. The label should appear next to the paragraph, and
anytime somebody wants to link to that paragraph, they just type
DeepThoughts#indeed. (JWB)
Here's where it gets cute. Doing this feels like tagging. You're
just tagging granular content instead of documents... which is what
PurpleNumbers are designed to enable in the first place. So, make the
label a tag across the entire Wiki. In other words, if you click on
the label indeed, you get a search page showing all paragraphs
on the Wiki that have been tagged indeed. If you really want to
be cute, you can make it a TechnoratiTag so it gets crawled. (JWC)
This makes cosmic sense. Both Wikis and tagging work when labels are
not unique -- the exact opposite requirement of PurpleNumbers. You
want namespace clash, and Wikis and tagging give you that. This way,
you get the best of all worlds. You still have the immutable, unique
PurpleNumbers, but now they're not so ugly. You also get
LinkAsYouThink granular addresses and granular tagging. Everyone
wins. (JWD)
(By the way, rabble, looking forward to seeing pretty PurpleNumbers in
typo!) (JWE)
/tech/purple |
Posted at 10:25pm
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