OWL Guide, early hypertext, and “replacing” the Web

oldvcr.blogspot.com

37 pointscarlesfe4 comments

This is about an early browser called OWL, not the Web Ontology Language (OWL)[0].

Nor the Object Windows Library[1] which was used for early 90s apps, and for a moment I thought the article might have been discussing early UX of the Turbo Vision and OWL sort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library

The browser was called Guide. OWL is the company name (or nickname, since the formal name was Office Workstations Ltd).

> Not all of these have direct analogues with HTML5 (in fact, action buttons could even run shell scripts!) and some of their core conceits are rather different. Indeed, its most pervasive and interesting navigational mechanism is the concept of replacement: embedding the content referred to by a link ("replace button") directly where it was referenced.

Looking at their examples, this seems to be directly analogous to collapsible disclosure elements in HTML5 using <details>: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...

(The later part about linking to different states of expansion is not, although I suppose you could record the open/close state of the hierarchy & stash in a cookie/local-storage and replay it with JS.)

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