Tinderbox at eNarrative

Mark introduced Tinderbox, since it was a fairly new product when the conference happened. Some quick notes from that presentation:

• Tinderbox split functionality off from Storyspace.

• Anders Fagerjord's site uses tinderbox, and he has tips sometimes. Markbernstein.org is a tinderbox blog.

• "The Victorian Web is like a blog of a community." NO - it's edited, 'posts' are approved by a secondary authority. YES - blogs get edited. NO - secondary editing party. YES - blog clusters get unlinked and ignored out of existence.

• In a war, hypertext would be lost. The community would be lost. They're all overexcited geeks.

• Agents can get distant blogs

Is a Tinderbox-built page a hypertext? No, there's no hiding and revealing. Yes, if you make links pop-ups? No - it's a rendered collage, hypertextual but not a hypertext. No, because you can't backtrack. Well, it's a hypertext with a non-hypertext projection, then.

Where Storyspace was about dynamic links and presentation, Tinderbox is more of an organizational tool. It's about notes, indexing, organization, agents. Eventually it would be nice if they were interoperable, so that you could drag things back and forth.

Storyspace has been around since 1987/1991 (what are those dates?) ... and has therefore spent more than a decade as a chunk of code. That's pretty rare. Victory Garden and Afternoon are still there after a decade. Things that were unusual about Storyspace then:

• links.

• Can find the spaces in another file despite being renamed, moved, a different version.

• Links were stored within the file.

• A text space = a window.

It was a tool for reading and writing large hypertexts, especially focused around narrative. There are features that are still unusual in 2002:

• Guard fields to qualify the destination of links

• external links are stored internally

• you can have overlapping link sources

• you can make anchors appear and disappear

• two-handed reading (for showing links, at least).