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Hypertext is, at most, only 52 years old; by contrast, printing had hardly made a ripple in its first 50 years. The first four entries in this quick-reference list are for the digerati (Wired Magazine's cute term for "digital literati"), but the last seven are required for anyone who wants to understand enough to make decisions concerning their future.
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Concept (1945)
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Vannevar Bush (Science Advisor to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman) published the article "As We May Think" in the July Atlantic. The article predicted that technology would remake our lives and thoughts. It ranged widely over a variety of technologies; the last two sections speculated on the effects of linked text. Any major online search engine will produce a dozen locations for the article.
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Term (1965)
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Ted Nelson was a frustrated writer who thought he could create avant garde fiction if he could just flit from place to place. Neither he nor any of us librarians trying to author the new generation of reference works succeeded; but at least he left us a word to describe our failure.
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Invention (1975)
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(That's right; it was predicted without a name, and named before it was invented.) Xerox's PARC think tank also came up with GUIs, lasers, and ethernets -- but the bosses in New York didn't think any of it was practical.
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Apple's HyperCard (1985)
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The boys in America's most celebrated garage were, as usual, ahead of their time. HyperCard had little effect except to define the one-screen topic and to stimulate Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee.
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SGML (1986)
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The first TCP/IP markup language was released as ISO Standard 8879 to provide a vehicle for porting documents across platforms. Other features (too many other features) were added later.
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HTML (1989-90)
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Tim Berners-Lee was a scientist at Switzerland's CERN research lab (now he's head of the W3C, which we'll come to know in a future article). He was looking for a way to jump through lengthy scientific papers. The HyperCard apple fell on his head.
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WinHelp (also 1989-90)
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Bill Gates was also taking note. Microsoft needed an in-house system to document the nascent Windows O/S. (The fact that WinHelp and HTML evolved into mature systems separately and simultaneously is vital to understanding the current Great Schism.)
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Mosaic (1994)
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Refugees from CERN ended up at NCSA in Univ. of Illinois, where they developed a working browser for HTML. A spinoff from NCSA formed Netscape a year later.
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HTMLHelp (1996)
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Ralph Walden (Microsoft's lead help developer) dropped his "WinHelp has no future" bombshell at the Seattle WinHelp conference. The WinHelp world panicked needlessly.
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"Stop Bill" -based Help (1996)
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Netscape's original intent was the same as Microsoft's: in-house documentation. Others soon convinced them that they were the last, best hope to stop Microsoft on the hypertext front. Sun and Oracle soon developed similar systems; making them compatible will be easy. [Written in 1997; in 1998, Sun subsumed Netscape's help efforts.]
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DHTML, XML, ??? (1996-??)
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Convinced that HTML (or perhaps just the W3C's certification process) was seriously behind the curve, advocates for other standards emerged. Watch these developments closely. [Three months after this was written, W3C had released new standards for HTML, DHTML, and XML.]
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Anybody with a 2400-baud modem and a telephone can access the Big Database In The Sky. This can have major liability and security implications if you post information. Here are some guidelines you should consider now.
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Liability
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Ownership of a Page. Who owns the material on a company Website: the company, or the contractor they hired to design it? In the traditional print world, it would normally be the designer, but this can easily be overridden in a contract. If the company retains control, can the designer reuse a similar technique on another site?
Ownership of the Information. One of the beauties of hypertext is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel -- you can link to it. If that information is proprietary, are you stealing? Not if the destination is public and the reader actually leaves your page; quite possibly, if you import the other page in an embedded window; probably, if you do that without attribution; certainly, if you copy the info without comment. You don't have to know that the material is protected.
Caching. Storing information from another page on your computer is rarely prosecuted if it is only for efficiency in future visits; but if the cache permits avoiding the provider's advertising, or if the cached page becomes outdated because the provider has revised it, legal issues are raised.
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Security
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The flip side is that other people (whether accessing you directly or through someone else's linked site) can see your proprietary information. Of course, the ultimate answer is: don't include anything sensitive. A technique that is effective in establishing that infringement occurred (but not in stopping it) is to insert an introductory screen describing what is proprietary and setting restrictions on use.
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Summary
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Photocopy technology prompted a major rewrite of the Copyright Act when I was in library school (1970s); digital transmission is about to do the same. Like most aspects of telecommunications, the situation is very fluid. If in doubt, see a lawyer. More detailed lay treatments can be obtained from many sources, including the following:
Beck, Emily; & Joseph Devine (eds.). Hypertext / Hypermedia Handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987. [Book is a decade old, but the chapters on intellectual property (15 & 16) are still valid.]
Lupo, Anthony V. "The Collision of Copyright and the Internet". In The WinHelp Journal, Part One: issue 3:3 (Spring 1997), pp. 28ff.; Part Two: issue 3:4 (Summer 1997), pp. 34ff.
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We put a by-line on this article so you'd know who wrote it: a non-lawyer. Most hypertext managers need to understand this issue generally; if you need more, this article's not your answer. Find a lawyer who at least has an intellectual property specialization, and preferably online experience.
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