Written internet

It's been alleged that typing changes the content of text and that print alters the perception of reality itself. Such matters as attention span and careful consideration might be impaired by ASCII-based text, and the very existence or ASCII, Unicode and the like implies a print-like view of writing as consisting of a linear series of discrete but type-identical characters.

With today's wealth of storage, we're not tied to that kind of textual representation. With a graphics tablet and touch screen or a stylus it's easy to produce an image of handwriting, but a mere raster-scanned image is not adequate for these purposes.

So this idea has two separate aspects: a way of storing and reproducing pen-marks on a notional surface and a way of linking handwritten documents. Unfortunately this is based on monoline rather than a shaped nib or brush, and is monochrome, for purposes of simplicity.

It seems relatively simple to store a series of turtle-graphics-ish or other vector instructions for reproducing a piece of handwriting, combined with pressure, since graphics tablets already do this. Therefore, the first part of my proposition is that for some purposes, the notion of characters composing a text be abandoned in favour of handwriting, pen drawings, doodles and the like, stored as a series of vectors and pressure information.

When the document is viewed by others, it can be in the form of handwriting. This brings several benefits. One is that writers express themselves differently in handwriting and are maybe less likely to rant, type long screeds of bollocks and the like. Another is that the emotional content of the text is retained - haste might be inferred from untidiness, anger, frustration and emphasis from pressure. There is also a more fluid relationship between illustrations and text in that they become part of the same task and may be more spontaneous. The identity of the writer is harder to spoof. Also, the fact that various features of the input have become quantifiable allows manipulation and analysis in various ways - upright text can be changed to italics, if there's anything in graphology a formal system would exist which could make it quantifiable and testable, crossings-out can be removed and handwriting made neater by being editable in an offline sort of way.

Hyperlinking would be done differently. In a sense, linking of this kind has existed for centuries in the form of footnotes, indices, tables of contents and quotation. My second proposition is to bring this back. A link is indicated by a horizontal line over the word. The text or other series of pen marks linked to is then bracketed using distinctive punctuation, and the entire text selected is the minimum unit to which linking is possible. This prevents quoting out of context and possible interference with attention span. Hypertext is fine and wonderful, no problem with that, but this is an alternative.

The subject content of the text would not be explicit without some kind of tagging. That isn't necessarily a problem, just a difference. It means that each document is difficult to locate, perhaps leading to more concentration being invested in reading it and more value being placed on each text as a whole rather than fragments.

This would not be the World Wide Web because it uses neither its style of hyperlinking or documents in ASCII or HTML, so it would need its own application to access it. Clearly there is a problem with visual impairment It's not a replacement for either WWW or paper documents and they can't be substituted for it because it has different features, for instance it still links distant users together, but it doesn't remove the emotional content, the fluidity or the presence of someone using a pen and paper. It does, however, allow people to collaborate.