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Old 01-13-2005, 04:55 PM
srdiamond srdiamond is online now
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Join Date: 11-23-2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 126
The road to software hell is paved with wishes
for "the best of both worlds." Features that work well apart--cloning and hyperliking--limit the power of each when combined. Of course the user can simply refuse to use one, but the desire to accommodate features serving "very different purposes" will hamstring the developer, as he tries to accommodate an incoherent combination of functions.

You are discussing this at too concrete a level, when you infer that logical linking is inadequate because it can't accommodate references to contextual links. The question is how well it can accommodate the knowledge management function that they serve. Obviously, if you start with the premise that you need contextual links, you will end with the conclusion that you need hyperlinks. But if you start with the premise that you need to be able to easily access matter related to particular references in your note, you might conclude as I do that the most efficient and effective way to do that is with child logical links. UR gives you immediate access to the children in their own window, for god's sake. UR should build its features in an integrated way, not introduce the redundancy of hyperlinks and encouraging users to link in ways not supported by UR's core machinery, which is built on logical linking.

You said you didn't like programs that changed the way you think. I'm tempted to say, in light of your tone ("ridiculous" etc.) that you also don't like _arguments_ that threaten to change the way you think. But I'll limit myself to saying that you may resist doing things by a superior means, logical linking, that you are accustomed to accomplish with hyperlinks.

Stephen R. Diamond

Quote:
Originally posted by bkonia
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. You cannot use logical links to perform in-context linking. A logical link can only link two objects at the object level. It cannot be used to form a link between a keyword within a document and some other document.

There may be various alternatives, such as the method you proposed above, but none of these alternatives will link within context and that is my entire point. I also think it's a bit ridiculous for you to refer to hyperlinking as the "poor cousin" of logical linking. The "wiki" organizational paradigm is very different from, yet complementary to the cloning paradigm. Each has its strengths and weaknesses and each serves a very different purpose. Cloning is more structured, yet also more limiting. Hyperlinking is less structured but provides for an infinite number of possibilities for linking objects by providing the user with the ability to link from specific text within the object.

I've always felt that the ideal application would be one that could offer the best of both worlds - the structure of an outliner with the power of a wiki. MyInfo has accomplished this and at this point it is the only application I'm aware of that has both outlining and wiki capabilities.
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