The Next Wave of Format

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•Introduction

•The nature of formats

•How new formats come to be

•The state of creative formats on the web today

•The next wave of format

   Formats for coherence

   Formats for diversity

   Formats for navigation

   Formats for flux

   Formats for ubiquity

   Formats for identifying origins

•Conclusion

Formats for flux: Distinguishing among changeable, unchangeable, and semi-changeable documents.

"If [an] experiment were a static once-only development," wrote Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, in the original proposal for the Web, "all the information could be written in a big book. As it is, [the body of work at our lab] is constantly changing as new ideas are produced, as new technology becomes available, and in order to get around unforeseen technical problems….. Keeping a book up to date becomes impractical, and the structure of the book needs to be constantly revised."

Already, the Library of Congress is being criticized for not preserving archival copies of material on the web. Sooner or later, web pages will routinely embody formats that contain, for example, the last date they were modified, and the next date of change -- in other words, the date by which the page promises to stay intact, so users know how long they have to come back to it.

Ted Nelson’s planned design, the original Xanadu structure, went further than this; it was designed to not only let people change and find context, but to go backwards and forwards in time, retaining every successive version of a document so that people could see the changes that have occurred in a concept -- whether individually or collaboratively generated. Ted may be right that an underlying structure is needed to provide that kind of continuity. He proposes a different design for links, for example, which he calls "free-standing content links" -- a two-way link that would protect audiences against the familiar Web "404" bug, in which a destination page changes and the source page suddenly becomes less relevant.

But if the history of Ted’s technological work is any guide, his software structures will never be available at a large enough scale. Creative formats will probably have to pick up the slack. Indeed, it may be better to embed these concerns in human conventions and creative formats, instead of in software design.

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