News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 26

I finally remembered where the idea of the little permalink triangle came from: not, as I once thought, from Doc Searls' site, but from a project I did with Peter Hodgson where we did a hypertext version of Diary of a Madman. The triangle interrupted the main text to signal an entry into the thicket of hypertextual readings below.

Why, you ask, did we not instead make use of that marvel of HTML, the text link? I'm not sure (I'd never even asked myself that question until just now). Probably because I was trying for an exact lookalike of the earlier HTML version, which was itself a lookalike of a version done in some proprietary hypertext system, which was itself a lookalike of a version done in a third hypertext system, and so on back 10 or 15 years to the dawn of PC hypertext systems (my version is called 'madman7', and there's talk between Peter and I of a madman8). Somewhere in the DOS era there was probably a hypertext system that didn't know about or didn't want to rely on terminal bold or reverse video to signify linked text, and so displayed the link as an asterisk next to the linked text. I actually think madman7 looks nicer with the triangle than it would with linked text, but I may have to revisit that.

Anyway, here's the triangle, the colors darkened a little for NewsBruiser: . I like it better than the old triangle I made by hand , so I'm going to start using it for NYCB and after I check with Peter I'm going to make it the NewsBruiser default permalink image.

Note the subtle use of attachments there.