HTML 4.0 Sourcebook
(Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Author(s): Ian S. Graham
ISBN: 0471257249
Publication Date: 04/01/98

Nonlinear Media

The advent in recent years of inexpensive, yet extremely powerful, computers and graphical displays has made it possible to step beyond the linear approach and has opened up enormous—and still largely unexplored—possibilities in the organization and presentation of information. This is because a computer has no preferred organization for stored data and can easily store, index, relate, and access data in a number of different ways, subject to the design of the database holding the data and the capabilities of the database software. In addition, a computer can create a representation of the underlying data quickly, efficiently, and inexpensively, according to instructions provided by software and/or user input. In a sense, you can think of the stored data as a collection of book pages or page components (paragraphs, images, etc.) that can be shuffled and rearranged almost instantaneously by the computer at practically no cost. This is in stark contrast to the difficulty and high cost of modifying the order of printed material, or material on tape or film.¹

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¹This flexibility and speed also applies to audio and video, which in large part explains why text, audio, and video editing are now commonly performed on computers.

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Figure 4.1  The structure of a linear document collection, in this case a book. The ordering is implicit in the page numbering. Tables of contents and indexes simply provide referencing on top of this underlying structure.

At the same time, modern computer interfaces can directly, and again at low cost, present these data to a user—a Web browser is just one instance of this process. This also is a new phenomenon, since high-resolution computer display systems capable of rapidly displaying finely formatted text and graphics have only become affordable in the last few years. Thus, not only can a computer rapidly organize data, it can also nearly instantly present the data to a user, in almost any format (text, graphics, audio and video, etc.). A computer can consequently act much like a customizable printing press, capable of organizing and presenting data in decidedly nonlinear ways, limited only by the capabilities of the underlying software and the interests of a user.

Computer Games as Media

This has led, in the past 15 or so years, to the birth of several new media. The first (and still most popular) was video games. Games are inherently nonlinear in the sense described above, since they evolve in an unpredictable way according to the input (i.e., “play”) of the user. Video games preserve this model through an environment that incorporates both the game scenario and rules—the user “plays” in this environment and can explore nearly endless game variants, the number of possible variations depending on the sophistication of the game. The first games were very simple, with primitive graphics and limited scenarios, but today’s games, such as Myst, Doom, or Quake (my favorites), provide enormously rich environments and enormous flexibility in the way a player can explore the game’s virtual world. Indeed, anyone interested in understanding the possible future directions of digital media should spend time playing with modern computer games—even if it is hard to convince your friends that this really is “work”!

Hypertext and Multimedia

At the same time, it was apparent from the earliest days of computers that this new technology could realize the long-dreamed notions of hypertext and multimedia.² Inexpensive computers and easy-to-use programs like HyperCard and Macromedia Director opened up exciting new ways of presenting combinations of otherwise weakly connected media. Very quickly, hypertext and multimedia became the basis of new media design, with products ranging from multimedia wine guides and hypertext encyclopedias to multimedia/hypertext training packages. Indeed, today many corporations commission multimedia promotional presentations instead of the more traditional videos or films.

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²hypertext: a collection of text and graphics that can be explored, by the reader, in a nonlinear way; multimedia: the mixture of text, graphics, sound, and video in a single presentation. Note that many multimedia presentations are often linear. The combination of multimedia in a nonlinear hypertext format is often called hypermedia. In this book, the term hypertext can be taken as synonymous with hypermedia.

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Designing linear multimedia is relatively straightforward, whereas the design of hypertext or hypermedia introduces enormous design complexities. This is because each hypertext presentation must incorporate, within the presentation’s structure, the tools to let a user successfully and comfortably explore the collected material. Since, in hypertext, the components can be related in decidedly nonlinear ways, there are no simple organizational schemes, such as page numbering, that can serve as ubiquitous and commonly understood tools for navigation and location. And, unlike those in a game, the rules must be nonintrusive and easy to follow, since the goal is to communicate content, without the reader having to worry about navigation. Designers and researchers are still exploring ways of designing easy-to-use hypertext and hypermedia structures, and it is not a surprise that good design is something of an art, as opposed to a science.