Roam, Zettels, and Zips: a different approach

What if [[ invoked the current ziplink process, and [[[ invoked Mark B 's ziplink+dialogue box proposal?

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@beck, just wanted to thank you for this very helpful idea, I really appreciate it.

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Echoing some of the other comments, I’d appreciate the option of a dialog or some other UI support. I’m not very good at learning/remembering multiple variations of syntax, and my work styles don’t include sufficient persistent repetition for them to stick firmly.

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@Ejspark in answer to your question:

  • “Bad Character: Who do We Want our Hypertexts to Be?” by Mark Bernstein. Paper, slides.
  • “Docuverse Despatch: Information Farming for the Collective” by Mark Anderson. Paper, slides.

FWIW, both papers were in the ‘Blue Sky’ track so observation pieces rather than primary research. The 31 years of the ACM Hypertext conference (in the ACM Digital Library) do have a wealth of papers on/about hypertext from the purely technical through to the creative/literary side.

Unless directly related to this and to avoid thread drift, if there are questions relating to the above papers I’d suggest raising them in a new thread. :slight_smile: I may yet split out your post and my reply into a new thread.

Thanks so much. I look forward to digging into these. We’ll see if a new thread is born… :wink:

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Second, thank you Beck. Extremely useful.

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Agreed. I my opinion, the beauty of wikilinks is the speed of creation and no dialog box/form to break the flow.

I like this. Offer us the the option to have Append Backlink by default checked or unchecked. Then we have choice.

For what its worth, it seems that Workflowy has jumped on the bidirectional bandwagon. Although it is not available yet, I have read in several places they are working on it. It might be interesting to see how it gets implemented.

I hope it is more than that a done for a reason other than trends. The years beards for men are popular in the West. nest year? Who knows.

The real point seems affordances for traversal of a link rather than whether it is—or has the appearance of—directionality. Were weto bother to look at the TBX data structure we would see Tinderbox actually uses a linkbase, at risk of using pre-Web terminology. Each link is essentially defines as being between two $IDs.

So I think the real question is can two-way traversal affordances be increased without either breaking significant current use or engineering at scale with poor ROI? As a long term user who has used this app for serious work since the mid-2000s I’d hate to see functionality broken on the altar of fashion. Actually, I don’t see both end points as antipathetical but I would urge caution in rushing to follow fashion. Beards may be ‘out’ by next year.

I’ll get my coat…

No worries.

I believe I have read every published research paper in the literature that impinges on link directionality, as well as a good number that were never published. I have also read deeply in (and contributed a bit to) the literature on link structure and hypertext rhetoric, which is (after all) the study of how to use links to make meaning.

This isn’t a question of fashion.

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