The Role of Reactive Typography in the Design of Flexible Hypertext Documents

We introduce the concept of reactive typography with the aim of exploiting the nature of electronic text in the design of interfaces to a shared information space. The usefulness of reactive typography is gauged through a few simple experiments. We describe how reactive typography can be used as a medium for in-context data visualisation and argue how this investigation is related to the presentation issues of the product of mechanisms for dynamic document construction and re-use. This relationship is more prominent when considering web agent systems for data mining or relevant information extraction. The latter often provide flexibility at the expense of the user's sense of interaction control because their inference engines often fail to capture accurately the highly dynamic and context specific nature of reader needs. This leads to ‘soft’ issues such as how should agents be designed in order to inspire trust of usage. A step in that direction is to allow the said web agents to reflect their internal state of affairs at the level of information presentation. Reactive typography may have some contribution to make in that respect.