Topics

Hypermedia

I'm Spwashi. I build software and make art. Hypermedia, here, is a surface you can re-read, a capability the page offered, and a receipt another reader can check. Spw is the grammar I use for those three parts.

The page is the medium. Headings, links, and the sentence you are reading have to hold without a script. Attributes such as data-spw-semantic-expression sit on that same document. They name a relation. They do not replace the sentence.

A host can be this site or another site that keeps the same habit: HTML first, a readable source beside it, and a projection that a person can open. The expression medium[surface]{document.reread} is the claim. It does not require a particular product underneath.

A link is a move this page offered. Following it enters another object with its own boundary: another section, another route, another host. The sigil on a chip says what kind of move it is. Wonder opens a probe. Action commits. A concept-edge projects onto another surface. A frame addresses a named handle.

Scholarship already asked for this at a larger scale. Alan Kay argued that a browser should safely run encapsulated objects fetched from the network, so content stays open instead of fitting a fixed menu. Ted Nelson’s hypermedia was a literature of connection: a passage that remains the same passage in more than one place, and links that can point both ways. I use those arguments as theory. I do not treat a neighboring implementation as something this page can speak for.

A receipt names what entered, what changed, and what a later reader can check. On this site that check is often by hand: the same seed rendered twice, or a claim with its witness still attached. Consequence arcs are the same shape in mathematics: state, constraint, response, receipt.

Interaction should leave that kind of trace. A tap inspects. A hold primes. The page ought to show the consequence of the gesture. Wonder and attention are residue of a visit, not a second document hiding the first. Kinship between notes is written as subject[mode]{parts}. The page does not guess which sentences belong together.

The same mark is readable in the source and clickable on the page. That is the ethos I am developing: interactive semantics that stay legible as text. A later pass can revise copy across the site by reading these expressions and the wonder they leave. This topic is the place that work can start.