 All right, so you should see a representation of new vote on the left and the J www.jsoftware.com homepage on the right. Yeah, okay great so I got curious a week and a half or so ago about the nature of wikis on the web and Mostly when people think about delivering a wiki they seem to think in terms of duration So optimizing the curation that means being very careful about what content goes into it It means indexing well categorizing well and so on and all of that is it strikes me right and natural and appropriate But I got interested in another aspect of the problem, which is the presentation of the content the presentation of the wiki What's the experience that the user has in trying to absorb navigate the information? And it struck me that we're sort of prisoners of the web in that regard and in particular prisoners of maps A map is just any set of links that's supposed to orient you in the content of the wiki So it could be in the case of the J wiki new vote is a very good example of a map But maps could also be just tables of contents So the J for C programmers table of contents which has over 300 entries. That's a map It could be search results the list of results you get from Google or from a wiki search page That's a map. That's a context an orientation mechanism that you use to help find your way around in the wiki And one of the things that struck me was we have a lot of maps. I would say too many and by too many I mean more than one the other thing that struck me is that the The maps are constantly disappearing on you So if you're looking at a map of search results, for example, which might just be a list of links with no particular structure to it Every time you click on a link your map disappears your context your orientation is gone as you load up the target page And then to add insult to injury You have to incur the cost of reloading the map when you go back and then arguably even worse Reorienting yourself in this context that disappeared on you a moment when I go. Yes, I Routinely use open a new tab or open a new window when I'm on search results page or that sort of thing Yeah, yeah, although opening a new tab does cover up your search results page. So you're still losing context But yeah, there are things you can do to mitigate the problem for sure. I Started to think about what it would mean to create a mono map Interface to a wiki a moderately sized wiki I'm not going to pretend that it would work for the Wikipedia But I'm imagining that it might work for something of the order of size of the J wiki and this is One and two I wondered what would happen if I allocated enough real estate Sort of by fiat that the map would never have to disappear that it would always be present You would never lose your orientation your context and that one map would be used for all orientation It would be used for all browsing navigation search Categorization and so on there just be one map that you gradually become more and more familiar with and this is One approach to meeting that set of specifications so We're looking at here is a representation of new vote. You'll notice that there are no valence lengths It's just the glyphs and the way that works is when you hover on a glyph the valence links appear And sometimes there are many and sometimes there are few but the interface essentially Reorients itself a little bit in order to show the links and then what happens As you hover on a link The corresponding page appears and what's interesting about this is a couple of things One is you're not losing your context. You're not losing your map as you see the page. So basically your navigation time In some sense arguably is cut in half It's you twice as fast in your navigation because you're never going back. You're always going forward and I should say that this Experience I'm having trouble with my link loading sometimes slower than it should be and occasionally it doesn't happen at all This is a very split personality Interface in the sense that it's sort of fast as a twitch video game on the left But more like a mainframe terminal on the right. I find it a little disorienting. I hope you'll hope you'll forgive me I'm clearly doing something wrong with the web view. I haven't figured out what it is yet So that's the new vote part and the right side behaves the same as the left side. It's not there's nothing very strange about it What's more interesting? And really I'm having link-loaded problems You can use a progress indicator somewhere to see what stages on the loading Well, there's only there's only two things happening one is get HTTP and the other is load and they're both I've watched them go by and get HTTP get HTTP and load both happen And yet there's nothing appearing on the web view. So I'm not really quite sure what's going on Fail Sometimes get HTTP can fail the timeout or that sort of thing right right? Well, I'm gonna ask you to use your imagination then for now on and just pretend that the links are loading Hey, this is a really good looking prototype right now I can use my imagination. Oh Thank you good So the other part and to my mind the more interesting part of the the map on the left is the documents the non new voc documents and They're divided into two categories and they're shown in islands. So the top set of islands are Media wiki excuse me wiki island. So the assays the ancillary vocabulary pages phrases system and so on and Then the bottom set of islands are I ran across the term frozen Content somewhere. I don't know if it's the term of art or what but it's the term I used in this particular interface And this is older content that may not be kept up to date, but still has significant value and Should presumably be kept around in some form But basically we're signposting it here and saying here abide monsters You need to be a little careful about this the syntax may not be right and so on The way this works and I'll ease into it slowly if you hover over an island like phrases you get a Some of us are old enough to remember the automatic address book So that was it had an alphabet going down the side and it's slider And it would let you automatically open to the right page in your address book So that's the style that's used here and what happens when you hover over a letter This will show you a list of all of the items In this case in the phrases category in this column There's only one column because there are very few phrases compared to the two phrases and as you hover from item to item the corresponding page loads when it works And if you leave if you leave the column of the new vote comes back Now it gets more interesting with larger islands So you get two columns with the ancillary vocabulary pages and you have to pick your column and whichever column you're in is the column where the corresponding page titles appear and then And this is the scary part you get to something like essays and essays desperately needs subheads you've got one two three four five six seven columns to play with and You look at something like I think it's guides guides has subheads So it's not quite as overwhelming a list when you look at it But essays and also J4C Programmers is so large. It's so voluminous that you really you want subheads. Otherwise, it's just a jumble of letters Okay, so this is browsing and navigation this is getting your arms around what all is in the wiki How is it organized? How much is there? The sorts of questions that are very hard to answer with a web style interface But easier to answer with a monomap style of interface Let's talk about search I've implemented simple string search of Link labels. So for example, if you look for rank Couple of things happen you get a couple of hits in new vote So is the rank conjunction in new vote? And if I hover on again that loading we're working would load So as well as the verb info conjunction shows up and then I've got Hits in the documents so the ancillary links I've got hits The rank from V rank info rank is important A verb rank discussion and the first column easy rank if you don't have a lot of time You're just you're in a hurry trying to solve a problem Now what's interesting about this is I happen to know there are two dozen hits here And it would be reasonable Often when somebody gets a lot of hits the their instinct is to type A more restrictive search and try to cut down on the number of hits But because we're showing these hits in the context of the monomap They're automatically categorized So if you were just looking for rank in new vote, it's easy to find. Oh, yeah, that's right I forgot what the glyph was but now I see that it's you know, it's blinking So it's very obvious that rank is a quotation mark If you were looking for a more extended discussion of rank You had some questions about how it's used and so on Checking out the essays the hits in the essays would be a natural thing To do or possibly the ancillary pages Now what's interesting is all of the frozen content Which is arguably more problematic might not even be included in the wiki conceivably It's not getting in the way. It's not polluting your search results But it's there if you need it if you weren't able to find anything that you wanted anything that was helpful in the live content The content in the wiki Well, open up j4c, you know dive in and see what you can find and there are There's actually I happen to know extremely good discussion of rank in j4c discussion That will probably always be relevant and it's there if you need it, but it's not getting in the way if you don't Let's search in the monomap and then Bob, I know that you're looking at the question of categorization So sets of links that that cover various categories and I made some up here statistical analysis higher math indexing and search and so on and In a web style interface the way you would handle that is you'd have yet another set of maps You'd have a map for Beginners for example, and it would have a couple of dozen links on it And that map would disappear when you clicked on one of those links and so on as I discussed before In the monomap interface one way you might handle this to say, all right, let's let's look at the beginners lakes And they just become hits in effect And so you've got your absolutely essential terms The glossary how to use nuvo and so on And then there's information and guides as well. I just made these up obviously the real links would be would be presumably different But again, here's a case of yet another set of maps and we can implement it all within the context of this monomap that covers the entire website So if I understand it Yeah, go ahead I was gonna say if I understand it The monomap you've got basically you can change the lens that you're looking at So now you're looking at it as a beginner's lens or back to a reference lens saying That I think is a good way to express it. Yes, exactly And I I should I should emphasize and I should have and then I'll stop I should emphasize this in the at the outset I can't imagine this becoming a production delivered Big Like most very left field prototypes. It's unlikely to make its way into users hands The the pipeline from Demo to prototype to product is very narrow and very difficult to navigate The point of this is more to throw off ideas That might become relevant to a more conventional development effort And that's really all i'm trying to do is expand the discussion a little bit And with that I will stop. You're the first people I've shown this to so any comments questions critique discussion I'd be very happy to hear um So Ed are these Are the three columns just because there's so many it's it's wrapping around Exactly. Yeah, that's not clear. I need to work on that. But yes, that's exactly right With the three columns, Ed Do you think it would be possible instead of Devoting a column to your single letters Which when you see the the the expansion off to the the right you can see clearly. It's the first letter in the line But would it be possible instead of doing that? Put those two fields together and you just have a one two or three or however many um However many pages you have to go through Because the the the single letter doesn't actually really help you It's it's the fact that when you select that field you can see the full expansion, right? Right So I'm not sure I understood the second part of what you said, but I wasn't following the first part Okay, so what i'm saying is the really the information really is useful to me when I look at this what you've got right now for j4c Is the field to the right so it's got thread verb and I can see everything spelled out Now to go through the different um The different pages if you will of these of these expansions You're really just going from one to two to three to four to five to six to you know, they're nine of them. I think Yeah, what if you just had Across the top of your expanded field essentially one through nine in the case of j4c And you just select on one and you're going to see all the stuff That is below it I take your point. Yeah, you're probably absolutely right. Um But I If there was something more that the single letter was doing Then I wouldn't suggest putting There is something there's two things it's doing. Okay. Um one thing it's doing is it's giving his concept of a a fixed Um a fixed field something that that your muscle memory can can pick up And the other thing is it's retaining on the right hand side the original structure of Of the presentation is the chapter format is being retained there So it you write that in and of itself these letters don't mean much you have to Start browsing to to to even see how they connect anything But I I wouldn't say they don't that they do nothing. I guess what I'm saying Tricky, I take both of your points Yeah, I've got to think about that for a bit. The only question I've got is You're right, Raul. I can see that they are doing something. Are they doing enough to justify that center space? That's that's that's a question. Yes Yeah, there is a glance I find it so much confusing just all these letters and not any particular There's also some rather unfortunate consequences here Like um r&d fart in the middle of the display About three lines down What the mouth is Oh The universe is playing games Don't know what to say Did not have planned it Let me let me think about that a little harder The interesting one interesting thing about having all the letters is that if I had Pages one through nine across the top And I were you know way down at the bottom of the list I have to go all the way back up select the next page and then come down again Whereas here I've got a sort of 2d navigation though. That's true from column to column If you can if you can move over to the to the right without having a jump Which is which is going to do here unfortunately unless you slow down the hover time I guess if you move quickly if you can move all the way to the left again, you can control there that would be useful You can move over into the table and to the word to to the wordy part. Oh, I see. Yeah No, unfortunately you'd have to move very fast and deep Um, I'd have to yeah, I'd have to fix that. Uh, yeah. All right. Well, uh, so role Bob you've given me a lot to think about here, right? There's there's a lot to hate in this jumble of letters this crossword puzzle that we're looking at Yeah, but it's it's it's it's yeah, it's it's there It is a jumble of letters right now, especially when you look at j for c I mean you start to see where the overload occurs, right When you've got a you go to say to the answer or the phrases or something like that it becomes much more manageable Um, you know that you've got a you've got a couple of pages, but again, I'm just not sure whether If there was a way to move between the pages across the top of the expanded I will think about it. Yeah. Yeah And there's also other things that would be assuming that that these issues get sorted out and it's actually decided Somebody decides that this is kind of fun Um, there's the the the speed issue which there's things I I think we could I know how we could do to to improve that but there's also the maintenance issue of As we update the wiki, how do we propagate changes? How would we propagate changes? This thing which which kind of implies some need for um it's a spider I search engine spider type of a I think that that catch his updates. I I I that's what I built It doesn't I mean it doesn't but it does catch updates, I guess, but it's very fragile As you could imagine. Yep. I it's not the right. It's not the right way to do it um, I think I think probably and I hesitate to say this because it would be work um Where there are map pages on the wiki so new vote So j4c assays ancillary Vocabulary phrases and so on Rather than maintaining those In media wiki pages where there's tight binding between content and format that makes spidering really difficult Particularly the new vote What I would suggest is that one approach would be to say look we're going to keep Abstract minimally formatted representations of those map pages so new vote Ancillary pages phrases system scripts and so on In tables and they could be media wiki tables that could be maintained by the community conceivably But they would be minimally formatted So in the case of j4c, for example, it would just be Links titles and maybe some indention information In the table and then we'd have a spider. We'd have a generator. We have generator routines One set for media wiki, which would take those Tables and generate the fully formatted media wiki map pages And another set for this or something like it That would take those same tables and generate this this presentation And it's no less Either way we go it's going to be there's going to be software that you'd have to to write I mean, well, it's it's worse than that It's not just the software and the software is actually pretty trivial Where does it live who maintains it who gets pinged when there is a change to one of those table pages Who's responsible for running the extraction software and checking to make sure it's produced a good, you know Good nicely formatted media wiki pages or whatever It's a whole thing and it's not just a question of writing some writing some code This community is more than capable of doing that It's a whole system policies procedures roles and responsibilities that would have to be set up and maintained going forward And that's work Yep although I should also add that When I did the books I it is possible to do You know to to do a scraper that that is is style aware and does a recently good job of extracting contracting most content Right. I actually tried to write a scraper for a new book that would infer part of speech from the color of the did I don't recommend that as a as an exercise In the end I said that's quite the easiest thing because that's not going to change hardly ever that can be a hard coding table You Hard to speech Yeah, yeah. Um, in the end I spent a day extracting new book into a spreadsheet without formatting and that's what I used to generate to generate this Okay, so That is fun Holy spit, that's fun. I say Dave likes it Oh well good um So I uh, I got I've got two comments one which is a killer for this unfortunately, but maybe there's a way around it And that is this is really good on a You know laptop or a bigger system. It's not a handheld option. I don't think No, no But that just means that we know who we're targeting, right? I should also say that there's nothing to stop us from sorry There's everything to stop us but in principle one could deliver this in the browser Um major all the major browsers have enough graphics that you could you could do this. There's there's no problem at all Uh, the problem the only issue is we couldn't write it in our favorite language. It's not as far as I know Okay, so but but I guess just throwing out my first thing about handheld You're really not aiming this at a handheld community, right? Because it's just an it is a screen space issue, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I gave myself the luxury of a 1080p screen. Yeah. Yeah, so so let's not worry about that I was just wondering whether you had some magical way to come around it and I was thinking well, this could be quite cool But but but that's okay because I mean you aim at your your audiences um, the other thing I was going to say is what strikes me is This to me, especially the the new vote part to me This isn't it. This is an amazing interface into new vote. It's really probably the way new vote should have been created to begin with Because it does allow you to do much more exploration without having to jump back and forth between pages Uh, so you're you're just focused on the mono map as a presentation of new vote Right now. That's where I that that's where I see the strongest fit and in that sense We've talked about this actually in recent meetings There are areas of the wiki that you you've preferred to them sort of is frozen. That's not a bad term I don't think we've used that but it's not a bad term to use There are areas that are less likely to change or will change much more slowly or with more thought And those areas I think this could work really well for the areas that are changing more quickly I'm not sure that you would even worry about that think of this as a mono interface into the more stable areas And that's a huge win And why wouldn't you want a mono interface into the less stable areas? Well, you could aside from the cost The the the thing about the the um, I'm remind reminded of a RFC on distinction between cool links and hot links where cool links are basically the frozen content here And hot links is the stuff that that changes. It's very dynamic. And the thing about the model map is it is itself a cool presentation, you know, it's it's a um, it's a fixed presentation It doesn't allow you to it's not really designed to incorporate new content because that's um, you know, you You start having to rebuild the whole Fixed map when you when you when you've gotten you new you had a new section for example or whatever No, let's say I have a graphic section you have to you have to have a new a new you have to restart rebuild your your your If you want to have a graphic section It so happens I mean you could have as one of the wiki specification tables a list of sections with urls to the Those tables that are you know that represents section this can this can this can incorporate I think maybe I call a warm con I can it can incorporate some changes But if you like if you double the number of sections You you don't you're on a screen. That is true If you if you do things like add pages on an incremental basis This will have no problem handling that all of this is built in about five seconds when you launch the app um, and if if if the wiki were to have Additional essays additional ancillary content added it would accommodate that fairly gracefully If you did if you did things like Change the section labels for example In the guides that would break it. That's for sure Um, so you're right and maybe warm is a good way to think about it in that sense, but I also think that Barring major changes it would be possible to specify the map content in such a way that Minor to medium changes could be accommodated without code changes Guessing but that's my that's my guess All right, if there are no further questions, I'll turn it back over to bob and thank you all very much Hey, very very interesting