Leverage Outline Inclusion

Instead of copying an existing information and pasting it into some new content (the way Xerox then Apple popularized later), better to create a link through a universal network to the unique original so that it appears inside its new context.

A visionary idea, specially since the Internet wasn't even in prototype stage. It never gained critical mass though, despite Ted's best efforts.

Almost 40 years later, Dave Winer applied the very concept to the outliners built into his desktop applications: outline inclusion was born.

In October 2002, after some rather lengthy experimentation, we achieved the same transclusion effect for texts inside a web browser, gradually expanding it to most of the Web popular multimedia formats so it would fit into Marc Canter's DLA vision.

Browser based inclusion provides a richer kind of hypertext link.

A regular HTML link substitutes the linked material to the current browser window's content (or opens it in a new window).

Whereas an outline inclusing link is more sophisticated: the linked material is embedded inside the current paragraph in the web page, preserving the links' viewing context.

Step 1: A picture is worth a thousand words.

Click the camera icon which replaces the 'standard' wedge at the left of this paragraph.

How cool is that ? Now try resizing your browser window, reload/refresh this page and try again.

Got the picture ?

The inclusion property lets you create a sort of 'attachment' to an outline node (or paragraph).

But unlike an email attachment, the attached content is not part of the document: the outline only carries a link to the attached content.

Any 'linked' picture, in JPG, GIF or PNG format, is loaded over the Web, resized according to the current width of the paragraph it is attached, and inserted in the outline as a child node of the current one.

Thereafter, you can collapse and expand the parent paragraph to hide or reveal the picture.

Step 2: But it's not only about pictures...

Click the 'film reel' icon on this node.

Animations and movies are rendered like pictures.

So are sound bites such as mp3 podcasts. Click the 'speaker' icon on this node.

As with the picture example in Step 1, the first child node of Step 2 only carries a 'link' to the attached multimedia content.

Step 3: And it's even worse than it appears :-)

Now click on the 'up arrow' icon that serves as this node's wedge.

How weird! This outline expands into itself, it literarily has no end :-)

Of course, it's far more interesting to include other OPML outlines. This way, they can be expanded inside the current page, preserving the context around the linking node.

There's more: click the 'up arrow' wedge at the left of this paragraph.

iJot can display RSS news feeds as outlines, allowing their insertion in regular outlines.

Outline inclusion also allows the creation of distributed directories, as you can see by clicking on this paragraph's wedge.

Step 4: Creating included content with iJot's webOutliner.

Start by creating a new outline or loading an existing outline into the outliner.

Then select the node where you want the included content to appear.

This node will become the parent node of the included content. With the current version of webOutliner, this node should not have children nodes.

To add the link to the included content, click the 'attach' link icon (shortcut cmd/ctl-K) in webOutliner's toolbar.

In the attach link dialog, type or paste in the URL of a document you want to attach.

Or you can browse your computer for a document and automatically upload it to your iJot account, in the gems folder.

Click the 'attach' button, you will notice that the node's wedge in the outliner has changed to an up-arrow.

opml 1.0

last modified:
8/4/06 06:47:14 EDT.

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