What Can Software Learn From Hypermedia?

Abstract

Most of our interactions with the digital world are mediated by apps: desktop, web, or mobile applications. Apps impose artificial limitations on collaboration among users, distribution across devices, and the changing procedures that constantly occur in real work. These limitations are partially due to the engineering principles of encapsulation and program-data separation. By contrast, the field of hypermedia envisions collaboration, distribution and flexible practices as fundamental features of software. We discuss shareable dynamic media, an alternative model for software that unifies hypermedia and interactive systems, and Webstrates, an experimental implementation of that model. We give examples of patterns and challenges for software architecture that have emerged in our experimentation with Webstrates, and show that it subverts the principles of encapsulation and program-data separation.