Glacial Erratics

Purple Number Coolness Draft

May 26, 2003

Draft, Work In Progress, Usual Disclaimers Apply, Help a Brother Out.    (0000SO)

(Explaining the value of PurpleNumbers without a show and tell has proven challenging. Suggestions for improving this document are encouraged: I'm convinced PurpleNumbers are a good thing and I'd like to convince other people but I'm so deep in kool-aid now that I have trouble seeing.)    (0000SP)

PurpleNumbers are a system for enabling granular addressability in networked documents. While in essence this is a pretty simple concept, the way it works and how it is used deserves some explanation.    (0000SQ)

One of the many benefits of the internet is the way in which it makes a vast quantity of information available. News, research and the drama of human life are available at the click of a link. Access to this information allows us to participate in many aspects of human communication over distances.    (0000SR)

Making use of this information (using it again), though, is somewhat constrained. Consider the following example:    (0000SS)

I've just read a fabulous story that I found on the web. It's fairly long but it contains one paragraph that I think is just beautiful that I'd like to share with you. A usual routine might go something like this: I cut and paste the URL in an email to you and describe where in the document this beautiful passage can be found--"It's the paragraph that starts with 'It was a dark and stormy night' about halfway through"--or perhaps I can cut and paste the entire paragraph along with the URL.    (0000ST)

In either case you have to do some searching around in the document to find the original text. With granular addressability I could point you directly to the beautiful paragraph in one link and you can browse there and read Snoopy's extraordinary prose, in context. Here are three more examples:    (0000SU)

You and I are world famous researchers. We've been collaborating on a paper about the finer points of quark charm. We want to make sure our paper is well supported so we've been reading a large number of papers that we've found on the web. You want to tell me about several pieces of research that seem to contradict our conclusions. In an email, you give me the URLs and describe where to find the salient points: "In the Smith piece, look in the intro. In Jones, it's towards the end of the discussion". You don't want to just cut and paste the points because the context helps to explain.    (0000SV)

Your group at work has decided to be collaborative-software-enabled. You believe that blogs, wikis and email archives are going to facilitate the knowledge capture essential to fostering a culture of innovation. Your team is motivated and disciplined; knowledge once tacit has been made explicit in the bowels of your intranet. Someone in the group has a question, and you've remembered that you wrote a lengthy mail message about this some time ago. You're able to find it relatively quickly with the search engine, but when you give the URL to the group, they complain they don't understand which part of the message is the important part.    (0000SW)

You're in a workshop to discuss a paper that was made available on the web. Everyone has printed up their own copy. Somebody says, "I think this bit about Lacan misrepresents the development of language in the infant." Everyone else says, "Huh, what, where are you?" The original critic says, "My page five." Someone else, who used a small font, says, "I don't have a page five!"    (0000SX)

Granular addressability is a small, simple tool to help with these situations. It is not a new idea: The Bible provides easy access to Book, Chapter and Verse. Many works of classic literature are published with line numbers. It is also not an idea without a future: the Xpointer standard is specifically designed to provide (when browsers support it) granular addressability in valid XML documents (when they become more common) such as XHTML.    (0000SY)

PurpleNumbers fit in between printed line numbers and Xpointer as a tool for making reference to existing documents as well as creating documents that enable easy reference. PurpleNumbers provide handles to sections of documents that can be used as links in electronic documents that refer to the sections or used as labels in conversation about the sections. PurpleNumbers can address each of the scenarios above. In the first three cases PurpleNumbers allow the discovery and use of a direct URL pointing to the content being discussed. In the latter case, PurpleNumbers can provide a human readable label that points to the text and can be used in speech: "It's at purple number 52".    (0000SZ)

The PurpleNumbers systems that exist today are based on the addressing features of DougEngelbart's Augment system. The systems come in two forms:    (0000T0)

Document Processors    (0000T1)
These systems take new or existing content and process it to create a new document that has PurpleNumber identifiers and links in the text. Such systems are good for applications where filters can be used at the moment of storage such as mailing list archives, wikis and document transformation. Because of the way documents are processed, even in the event of changes the PurpleNumbers stay with the text they are originally associated with.    (0000T2)
Document Proxies    (0000T3)
These systems take existing documents and dynamically present them with PurpleNumbers attached. This works well with documents that are not expected to change and for which creating new documents may not be useful.    (0000T4)

See PurpleWiki and PurpleSlurple for links to more information on the tools used to create PurpleNumbers.    (0000T5)

Most graphical web browsers have a feature to copy the URL of a link to the clipboard. In some operating systems when using Internet Explorer and Mozilla you can right click on a link and "Copy Shortcut" or "Copy Link Location". When a document has PurpleNumbers there is a link, represented as a numeral or a '#' associated with each paragraph, list element and header in the document. Right click the PurpleNumber and, copy the shortcut and paste it into another document. The result? An instant granular reference, in context and with less navigational confusion.    (0000T6)

This may not seem like much, but with use the value of granular addressability increases until its absence feels quite the hindrance and an itch grows to add purple numbers wherever possible. They've been used on traditional web pages, mail archives, wikis, blogs, dialog maps, chat logs and many other places.    (0000T7)

Comments

1/8
On May 26, 2003 05:14 PM Tom Grey said:

In Slovakia, I've been looking at some UNDP documents, and World Bank studies. Their stuff in PDF files has numbered paragraphs. This is a start at the purple numbers.    (0000TA)

You, somebody, should ask for money for a project to demonstrate the archival/ research advantages of the purple numbers. Maybe with Transparency International?    (0000TB)

Similar, but far more complex/ difficult, is more granular subject categorization. That will prolly have to wait for better rating schemes on the relevance of various written words.    (0000TC)

Good luck. (But I prolly won't be back too often here.)    (0000TD)

2/8
On May 27, 2003 08:00 PM Chris said:

EugeneEricKim has made some comments on this entry on the PurpleWiki development list:    (0000TE)

  http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/forums/devel/2003-05/msg00058.html#nid03    (0000TF)
3/8
On May 28, 2003 01:12 AM mike said:

A suggestion:    (0000TU)

look for, and cite, concrete examples of the specific, exact thing you are doing in pre-web communications. Extrapolate from them.    (0000TV)

I can think of several:    (0000TW)

clause numbering in legal documents:    (0000TX)

 - breifs
 - contracts
 - legislations    (0000TY)

(which is often combined with line numbering)    (0000TZ)

--    (0000U0)

footnotes (using universal graf numbering opens the possibility of a different style of footnooting, more on this in a moment)    (0000U1)

--    (0000U2)

so here's what pops into mind: Anne, allong wit the rest of us, has been watching the shifting sands that slide here and there in the wake of Jayson Blair. Purple numbering provides a potential framework for academic-ish detailed credits without derailing the extat ideal and practice of trying to write well.    (0000U3)

Not that I can speak to the potential labor costs.    (0000U4)

Thus, may I suggest a forked dev path for PM: open source and raw and smooth, to be sold to law firms, the gummint, and news organizations, with each commercial incarnation a discrete product reflect ting the specific feature requests of the variant user bases and purchasing authorities.    (0000U5)

(see also sendmail and sendmail.com)    (0000U6)

4/8
On May 30, 2003 11:02 PM Chris said:

Testing pure plugin comment processing.    (0000V9)

5/8
On May 30, 2003 11:08 PM Chris said:

Improving pure plugin comment processing...    (0000VA)

6/8
On August 14, 2003 03:28 PM Antonio Cavedoni said:

Regarding Purple Numbers: without knowing them, I created a system that does pretty much the same, generating XHTML id attributes for each element in a page, thus making it addressable. With a bookmarklet you can then reveal those IDs a quickly copy and paste the URI you want to cite.    (0001HM)

For a better writeup of the rationale behind this: http://fawny.org/blog/2003/07/#id-h1    (0001HN)

And a quick technical writeup: http://cavedoni.com/blogorroico/200307#1322    (0001HO)

HTH --Antonio    (0001HP)

7/8
On September 13, 2004 01:37 PM Martin said:

I didn't RTM so apologies if this is already there: Cool as they are, shouldn't the purple ones be hidden until you need them, in order not to interfere with reading?    (NY4)

8/8
On September 13, 2004 04:29 PM Chris said:

Martin says:    (NY5)

I didn't RTM so apologies if this is already there: Cool as they are, shouldn't the purple ones be hidden until you need them, in order not to interfere with reading?  T    (NY6)

You might have a look at the implementations discussed in the various postings linked here.    (NY7)

I like having the PurpleNumbers showing so it is easy to do TransClusion, which is how I quoted your comment.    (NY8)

Sending...