Quotebacks and hypertexts

If you’re reading this on my website, you’ll notice that the next chunk of text looks a bit different. That’s because it’s a quoteback.

Quotebacks are like a quote retweet, but for any piece of content on the web. They work on any webpage, and gracefully fall back to a standard blockquote.

Thus, “Quotebacks” is three things:

1. A web-native citation standard and quoting UX pattern

2. A tiny library, quoteback.js, that converts HTML <blockquote> tags into elegant interactive webcomponents

3. A browser extension to create quoteback components and store any quotes you save to publish later.

Quotebacks is a project? invention? protocol? by Toby Shorin and Tom Critchlow. Here’s Tom’s introductory post: which has some background. The ultimate goal is to encourage and activate a deeper cross-blogger discusson space. To promote diverse voices and encourage networked writing to flourish.

I’m seeing a bunch of folks trying out quotebacks. If you keep a blog yourself, I urge you to give it a go. I’ll talk about why later in this post.

Me? I’ve written a Quotebacks extension for Python-Markdown

I’m not using the Chrome extension to collect quotes myself. I have my own weird workflow for hamsterkaufing the web.

But I do want to display quoteback embeds, and you can see one at the top of this post. (If you’re reading this in RSS or email, check the website.)

How? I write quotes in a special format in the Markdown text documents that lie behind this blog. (I keep everything in various forms of plain text and have done for a couple decades.)

These text docs are transformed into HTML for the blog using Python-Markdown. So I’ve written a Python-Markdown extension called quotebacks-mdx to transform this special format into the quotebacks embed HTML.

I’d also like feedback on the Markdown format I’m using – if people implement extensions in other languages, it would be good if something like this became a de facto standard.

Why did I do it this way?

And, even though I’m not using the Quotebacks browser extension, I’m adopting the embed format - the protocol - because of what we might one day build on top.

Some history: the Memex

Back in 1945, Vannevar Bush published his insanely visionary essay As We May Think in The Atlantic. Through his imagined machine called the memex he predicted the web and its effect on human knowledge, work, and conversation:

Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Phones!

Here’s the original essay though the Wikipedia summary is short and good.

The core feature of the memex is trails. It isn’t just a library.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. [Etc.]

Wikipedia! Work!

WELL.

And… bloggers:

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

Flash forward…

Hypertext and transclusion

In the early 1960s, Ted Nelson coined the text hypertext. The web is a hypertext, and the original 1989 proposal cited Nelson’s work.

His project Xanadu - although never completed - was an expansion of what he meant by this original concept.

Hypertexts are connected texts. But Nelson saw two types of connections: links (which we have) and something else called transclusion.

From one paper about Project Xanadu:

This may be simplified to: connections between things which are different, and connections between things which are the same. They must be implemented differently and orthogonally, in order that linked materials may be transcluded and vice versa. This double structure of abstracted literary connection – content links and transclusion – constitute xanalogical structure.

Transclusion:

Transclusion is what quotation, copying and cross-referencing merely attempt: they are ways that people have had to imitate transclusion, which is the true abstract relationship that paper cannot show. Transclusions are not copies and they are not instances, but the same thing knowably and visibly in more than once place. This is a simple point which is remarkably difficult to get across.

And later in the paper:

Note also that the famous “trails” of Vannevar Bush’s memex system (103) were to be built from transclusions, not links.

Here’s Wikipedia on transclusion.

Back to Quotebacks

What I love about the web is that it’s a hypertext. (Though in recent years it has mostly been used as a janky app delivery platform.)

And what I like about Quotebacks is that it already feels like an essential part of that hypertext toolbox! The Chrome extension meet the needs of Bush’s trailblazers; the embed format mimics Nelson’s transclusion.

Now the Quotebacks projects doesn’t immediately fulfil on this grand promise. But the great thing about a protocol is that I can adopt it and support it, and you can adopt it and support it, and if there’s enough of a consensus, we can build more on top. So what I’d be interested to see:

(I’m less bothered about finding out specifically when people use one of my posts in a quoteback. That would be neat I guess, but tracking mentions is a first-order problem and besides it’s a spam honeypot.)

What I’m talking about is the kind of hypertext that I love, one in which my blog is a place for thinking out loud.

My blog is not my notebook, and it’s not my marketing platform.

My blog is my laboratory workbench where I go through the ideas and paragraphs I’ve picked up along my way, and I twist them and turn them and I see if they fit together. I do that by narrating my way between them. And if they do fit, I try to add another piece, and then another. Writing a post is a process of experimental construction.

And then I follow the trail, and see where it takes me.