Purple Number Paradigms
June 11, 2003
Tom Coates comments on how the small revolution of permalinks brought about a paradigm shift in personal publishing. He makes several points on the value of a permalink that map directly onto the value of a PurpleNumber: (000137)
- Both a PermaLink and a PurpleNumber "make it possible for people to link to something with a higher level of granularity than just the page". (000138)
- Both inflict "more clutter on the weblog-page" that people get used to and provide what amounts to a nice cognitive handle. (000139)
- Clicking on both doesn't "take you anywhere" but allows you to make a reference. (00013A)
- Both provide a method for making a highly specific gesture, potentially encouraging discussion. (00013B)
- Both provide a method for building bridges between content. (00013C)
The value of the increased granularity of access provided by permalinks suggests, but does not guarantee, that the even greater level of granularity provided by PurpleNumbers will be valuable as well. It certainly has been for me. (00013D)
(The PurplePlugin should be ready for testing by stalwarts sometime this week, a solution to the config problem is in the works. If you want to help with the testing, have a MovableType blog of the 2.6 or greater variety, and can install Perl modules, let me know.) (00013E)
Comments
So, would word-level purple numbers be even *more* useful? :) (00013F)
In fact, that level of granularity *would* be useful to some people some times. But not often. And the "cost" of increased line noise would leave you with a net negative, at least for almost all people. (00013G)
So, echoing your point from a couple weeks ago about an object being a *potential* tool, I think the same thing has to be said about PN. It can be useful to some people some of the time. (00013H)
Also, as you noted a couple days ago, there is some implicit training needed. So that might imply that it could have value within a coherent-team context, but is less likely to do so in other settings. (00013I)
Weird design idea of the day: assign the PNs, but have some way of hiding them for most people most of the time. Maybe changing CSS stylesheets? Maybe some grotesque JavaScript?? I remember some FatClient? apps (HyperCard?) where pressing a certain key would make all hot areas on the card visible... (00013J)
I sort of think of purple numbers as a short term solution. If the web moves to a world of permanent URLs (a la handles or something like that) and everything is in XHHTML then XPath and Xpointer win and there's no need for purple numbers and people can get word-level granularity. (00013K)
However, I don't see that world coming anytime soon, for whatever reason, perhaps in part because those technologies aren't particularly transparent. (00013L)
I agree that PurpleNumbers are a constrained audience tool, but there are a whole lot o' people out there, so even a limited audience can be quite large. (00013M)
This: (00013N)
Weird design idea of the day: assign the PNs, but have some way of hiding them for most people most of the time. Maybe changing CSS stylesheets? Maybe some grotesque JavaScript?? I remember some FatClient? apps (HyperCard?) where pressing a certain key would make all hot areas on the card visible... T (00013O)
seems like a fine idea and can probably be pulled off with a variation of this javascript skinning trick. (00013P)