Bernhard Seefeld's Blog

User Interface Continuations

The presentation of Haystack was surely one of the (many) highlights of the 12th WWW conference in Budapest. You could feel how everybody became more and more excited almost to the point were it was almost unbearable to sit still when you really wanted to jump up and down in excitement. For me, this was one of the most vivid live application presentations of a semantic web vision. (Unfortunately as an island and in the current state, playing around with haystack around is only a fraction of the fun watching Dennis Quan demonstrate the power of this model).

The folks at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science are also publishing some interesting papers on other things, they came up with when building Haystack. One is the notion of User Interface Continuations (Via Chris Langreiter). Very interesting read, indeed. They idea of capturing an ongoing operation in its current state, thus implying complete modelessness and the ability to even save and distribute curried (as in functional programming) operations.

This made me think, wether this is in some sense a backport of a web UI element to traditional applications? Like the back/forward buttons as a generalized undo for things like changing directories, viewing mails, etc. In a GET-based and sessionid-less web application, the complete state on an ongoing operation is captured in the URL. It can be bookmarked and sent via mail. You can also run several of these operations in parallel. You can even curry operations for later user, like this phonebook form for queries in Bern. So it occurs to me, that this is quite similar to what is described in the article, isn't it?