Microcosm: An Open Hypermedia System

Davis, HC, Pickering, JA, Hall, W and Wilkins, RJ (1993) Microcosm: An Open Hypermedia System. In CHI '93: Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery. p. 526 . (doi:10.1145/169059.169520).

Abstract

The system consists of a number of viewers which allow the user to view and interact with many different formats of information. The viewers communicate with Microcosm which then sends messages through a filter chain. Each filter has the opportunity to respond to the messages by processing them, passing them on or blocking them. Important filters are the link databases or linkbases which are able to respond by finding links to other information. In Microcosm documents are not marked up internally: instead the link data is held in these separate linkbases, and the viewers communicate with the linkbases to find what buttons and links exist. Finally, because Microcosm is an open system it is easily possible to make links into and out of applications that are not part of Microcosm. It is possible to program many Windows applications to talk to the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) and in this case it is possible to treat such an application as a Microcosm viewer. In the video we see Word for Windows in use as a Microcosm viewer. When it is not possible to use the DDE it is possible to communicate via the clipboard and we show links being followed by simply cutting a selection to the clipboard. This is one of the most powerful features of the Microcosm but leads to a number of problems with the design of an interface that is consistent across different applications.

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Contributors

Author: HC Davis

Author: W Hall

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