![]() Multiple links can also overlap, or be placed on the same space but given different guard fields. Guard fields are simple codes with which one can say things like "If the reader has seen space 'foo,' send them to space 'bar,' and if not, send them to space ' Helen Shapiro.'" With guard fields, links can be given some texture. The behavior (that is, the destination) of links can be given some simple logic, with what Michael Joyce calls guard fields. You can create a link from a specific range of text, or you can link a whole space (in which case a click anywhere in the text will follow the space link). (Links are named in Storyspace, so you can refer to them in guard fields, on which more in a moment.) From the text view, in read mode, links are followed with a single click. Links to spaces elsewhere show up as a little abbreviated arrow, just long enough to show the link's name. If two spaces on the same level (contained within the same space) link to one another, you see the link right there, as a nice curvy arrow. ![]() (Storyspace does, incidentally, export HTML.) Many hyperfictions published by Eastgate let you switch to the Storyspace map view and look at the structure of their text screens, even navigating the hierarchy instead of following links. This, more than their hierarchical nature, is what gives Storyspace documents their sense of space, and justifies the choice of Storyspace as a medium over more accessible forms. You can arrange them into a happy face if you want. The thing that perhaps best distinguishes Storyspace documents from hypertext in other media is their visual nature. Double-clicking a space's "title bar" (which is much more compact and abstract than a regular window's title bar) opens its text, and double-clicking its body opens a view of the spaces inside it. Spaces can contain other spaces within them, which you see as little mini-space-icons inside the space (when looking at it in the default view). (Unlike E2, there's just the one writeup, and of course no voting or listed author or any of that.) In the main Storyspace view, spaces look and work a bit like bastardized windows. Spaces, the basic unit of a Storyspace work, are somewhat analogous to a node in E2: they have a title, and an underlying writeup. There is a hierarchy, with the name of the document at the top level, and the initial spaces right underneath it. Storyspace works a bit like an outliner (that is, in fact, one of its view options). Michael Joyce's Afternoon, cited by Robert Coover as "the granddaddy of hypertext fictions," was created in Storyspace. It is a hypertext authoring environment, created well before Tim Berners-Lee conceived of the World Wide Web, and first released for public purchase in 1990. Storyspace was created by theorist Jay David Bolter (author of the germinal text Writing Space), hyperfiction author Michael Joyce, and chief engineer John B.
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