Dave Morris wrote:
> This is exactly the approach taken by Hiltz & Turoff in their book
> "The Network Nation" (1st edition '78, revised '93). They encourage
> readers with different interests (social vs. computer scientist
> for example) to read subsets of the book AND their preface provides
> the suggested reading order for each of four pathes.
> ...Only one
> example so I suppose one shouldn't generalize but it can work.
Another example is Ivar Jacobson's "Object Oriented Software Engineering",
which has several prefaces that lay out paths through the book for different
"roles" of reader (manager, programmer, beginner, etc.). Also Ted Nelson's
"Literary Machines" which has several "Part 2s" depending on your interests.
I have seen a *lot* of good examples of this sort of thing in HyperCard and
NoteCards, and of course many web sites provide guidance to specific places/
sections of a large corpus of documents.
Effectively teachers/professors do the same thing when they prescribe
readings and/or exercises from a textbook. PATH/NODE is a common need,
and would be a very useful *facility*.
My main concerns with it are that the data structure be available to CCI-
based programs somehow, so they can create or follow paths, and that
activating a link has exactly the same semantics as elsewhere on the web,
so that user and user agent are working from the same model, and don't
have to be cognizant of crossing the HTML/non-HTML boundary. I guess I
am not sure how we can accomplish these by putting PATH/NODE in HTML...
-- Craig Hubley Business that runs on knowledge Craig Hubley & Associates needs software that runs on the net mailto:craig@hubley.com 416-778-6136 416-778-1965 FAX Seventy Eaton Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4J 2Z5