A better permalink? Or is that “purplelink?”

It has been a long time ago since I last heard about "Purple numbers". The idea is very good, but as you say, nobody is going to do this manually, and in all those months (years?) since the original idea, nobody implemented it in any CMS.

That is truly ghastly! I'm sure there is a place for it in long documents about specific subjects - but the usage in these examples alone is just plain daft. I would stop reading blogs written like that, just the same way I would stop reading any other badly formatted or presented blog.

I think Eugene Kim and/or Peter Yim know of a tool that automagically create the number...wait until dawn when Eugene reads this.

--bill

There are ways to do it that don't break, I do it on Scripting News.

But instead of using a sequence number, which breaks (as Scoble notes), I use the time the paragraph was created (which breaks if you create two paragraphs in the same second, hard to do). That way you can add a paragraph in the middle, or even move them around, and the permalinks don't break (I don't bother displaying a number, people don't need that, the machines do, so the number is encoded in the url as a time).

Now that said, I don't bother generating them for sub-paragraphs. I could, but I think that's a bit anal.

I think they're excellent. The problem may be in how they are displayed. But the ability to reference specific concepts, areas of thought and such in text can be very useful for search and aggregation of idea areas. This is in the realm of tagging and should be encouraged and supported.

I read "An Introduction to Purple" and find the numbers distracting.

I dont't think, a single paragraph is this important. I've never felt the urge to link to a single paragraph.

I mean, every composition by Mozart is referenced by it's Köchel catalogue number. If a simple number per piece is enough for Mozart's art, it sure is sufficient for my lame attempts at writing.

Janek.

Janek: being able to link directly to a paragraph is nice. The display of purple numbers might not be good, but look at http://www.scripting.com -- Dave Winer uses a similar concept.

Purple Numbers are a great idea, though some folks, like Tim Bray, prefer Purple Pilcrows:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/...

Though they boil down to the same idea, I think the granularity of purple is slightly different than Dave's permalinks. Purple numbers appear within (the equivalent of) a single blog/RSS item, whereas the permalinks are per-item. It looks the same in Dave's case because he only has one paragraph per item.

You might also want to check out Annotea, which allows you to mark pieces of a doc with per-character precision (using XPointer).

Ooops, wrong link, should've been:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/...

btw, loads of CMSs have Purple implementations, e.g. there are at least two for WordPress:

http://wiki.wordpress.org/?pagename=PurpleNumbers

Rather than posting purple numbers why dont you incorporate the links into the contents of the post. Information Mapping pushes chunking all info to make it easier to scan while labeling each chunk of information with a title. Make the title the permalink rather than 3C. The purple numbers are noise to a casual reader, by incorporating the idea into the actual content you add value to those who want the links while not disrupting the flow of the information.

Plus a title link is more relevant to the actual content of what you are linking to.

I stand corrected. I really like the logic of Dave's implementation of Purple Numbers.
BTW, does anybody know about a Movable Type implementation?

Janek: bad example. With Köchel numbers, measure numbers, beats, subdivisions, and note names, I can in plain English bring you to each exact note in a Mozart piece.

Purple numbers are valuable and pragmatic. On the other hand they do clutter the visual field. Also they fail to provide the specificity/generality often desired for cross referencing. A similar complaint can be directed against HTML named anchor tags (...) The page has too few (for the referrer), or too many (for the reader), or a referrer needs an anchor that refers to a span.

XPointer lets us refer to parts of a resource (page) explicitly -- without relying on the page author to have foreseen every permutation of subselection we might want to reference. But XPointer was initially crippled by lack of a practical, implementable (implemented) query language or "scheme".

This situation may be changing quickly since the folks over at the Text Encoding Initiative have defined (and co-opted) a nice simple little composable family of XPointer "schemes" based on simple, off the shelf stuff like XPath and friends: http://tinyurl.com/9lkat With this in place, the referring application reads the target page and applies the query part of the URL through the scheme(s) to arrive at the content.

The fun with identifiers like PurpleNumbers grows exponentially when you start using it to allow TransClusion.

Everybody always hits on the issue of purple number ugliness. In the earlier implementations that I've been involved with, making the numbers very apparent was important so that people knew they were there and had that moment of discovery. CSS and other tools can help constrain the presentation of the numbers.

In the end the implementation of granular addressability and transclusion isn't really that important: it's getting the concepts into brains so it can be improved and evolve. Small, simple, reusable chunks help build a complex and interesting world.

Janek wrote: " If a simple number per piece is enough for Mozart’s art, it sure is sufficient for my lame attempts at writing."

Actually, it isn't. The "K number" gets you to the desired composition (though there can be multiple versions) but then you may also specify the movement within the piece and even the section of a movement. (For example, 1st theme of in the exposition section of the first movement of symphony #40.)

Fun stuff...

Dan

There has to be a better way than this. I can see why they are useful, and I think it would be really nice to have some implementation of this concept, and I like the Bible example I just read, but visually it looks bad. And (as has been said before) implementation would be a bit of a nightmare.

There are bound to be places were you would want to only reference a single *sentance*, for instance - it would be really amazingly cool if my browser let me highlight part of a text and create a permalink out of it, which if you referenced it, would go to the page, scroll to the right bit of it and highlight the section. It's overheating my brain a little trying to think through the implementation of that(!) - but I don't think these purple numbers are it. It's got me thinking though... :)

@Tom
I like your idea for a browser imlpementation, as it does remove the ghastly links. But also, more importantly, it removes the writer from the misguided belief that every paragraph they write is worth bookmarking.

@Will
Using a title also makes sense - if you believe the paragraph is worth linking to direct, then it's probably worth having its own heading.

I hate the visual "noise." 99.9% of a blog's readers could care less about "granularity," so to them, the noise can be at best neutral, and at worst a nose-wrinkling irritation.

Here's a friendlier implementation: The publishing software can automatically create permalinks for each paragraph, but doesn't display them until you click on a link at the end of the post.

tom:for instance - it would be really amazingly cool if my browser let me highlight part of a text and create a permalink out of it, which if you referenced it, would go to the page, scroll to the right bit of it and highlight the section.

Such a tool exists (JavaScript+DOM-based). It's called Ahoy and works in every Mozilla-based browser, including Firefox, but requires the site/page owner to link the ahoy.js file into the page via a SCRIPT element. Just click and select some text with your Alt key pressed.

For example, a direct link to "creating your first Ahoy anchor from a text selection" (there's no 'preview' option for comments here, so hopefully Wordpress won't mangle the url):

http://dev.lophty.com/ahoy/article.htm?ahyAncho...

Here's the plain vanilla link to the article: http://dev.lophty.com/ahoy/article.htm

Ahoy is GPL'd. You can download it and use it on your own sites.

There have been PurpleNumber plugins for Movable Type for years now, but most people don't understand what they do or what the value is, so it's unlikely to become part of the core of any CMS. For most readers, it's just more screen cruft/clutter.

brian: thanks for that - that is _exactly_ what I had in mind! I'm gonna go play!

Mr. Scoble
You didn't miss the meme.
That's for the silly LiveJournal/Xanga/etc. kids.

;)

I agree a browser-based "implict A-NAME" would be excellent.

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/z2003-05-04-Im...

I think it is important to note that the purple number solutions mentioned here are for publishers and authors of content - not for consumers. In other words the publisher must implement the solution or no purple numbers are available for the consumer. Relative to the Web at larger, not many Web sites implement purple numbers.

Ahoy is cool in that it enables a _consumer_ of the Web page to link to a particular passage of their choosing, umm, provided the publisher has implemented Ahoy on their web site. I think this would also be the case for the Text Encoding Initiative.

Two years ago I got around this short coming of Ahoy by transcoding the Ahoy script into the target web page on the fly via a web proxy.[1][2]

A year or so prior to that I had written PurpleSlurple[3] to transcode purple numbers into web pages on the fly.

Last year I released QuiP. QuiP reverses the process of creating the granular link, vs PSAhoy, to a more logical sequence, to my mind: Select text to link to, click bookmarklet, optionally add note (something Ahoy doesn't do)[3].

Parlor tricks perhaps, but effective enough for my uses, and _importantly_ tools for the consumer.

[1]PSAhoy post: http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/yak/2003-11/m...
[2]PSAhoy sample: http://sasites.com/suse/apache/files/psAhoy.php...
[3]PurpleSlurple: http://purpleslurple.net/
[4]QuiP sample: http://sasites.com/quip04.php?url=http://scoble...