Hypertext in the Open Air: A Systemless Approach to Spatial Hypertext

This paper presents a personal spatial hypertext author-ing system called The Frame Stack Project, implemented as a lightweight set of classes in the generic object framework Morphic, available in the programming environment Squeak. Morphic provides a kind of off-the-shelf toolkit of objects and behaviors extremely relevant to spatial hypertext. In this project, run-time vs. au-thoring behavior is a state property of individual objects in a highly granular way. A key goal is the support of feral structure, in which objects can be created loose on the desktop, without assigning them any structural destination. This provides an implementation of an interactive version of the poet's notebook. The gran-ular approach to object authoring supports " interactive writing " in the truest sense of the word. INTRODUCTION This paper presents an ongoing project called (loosely) The Frame Stack Project. The term 'frame stack' describes an interface concept which I have been using for a number of years, and have described previously [9]. It provides a user interface for overlaying word objects on top of one another, while still allowing them to be read legibly. In the past, " frame stack " has been more of a conceptual artistic framework than an actual implementation; until recently it would not have been possible to examine any of my finished works and uncover actual objects identifiable as frame stacks. This paper describes the implementation of the frame stack concept as actual working code. It has resulted in a kind of personal spatial hypertext authoring system, but of a somewhat different kind than usual. Rather than an " application " , within which spatial hypertext development takes place, the Frame Stack Project consists of a lightweight set of classes that operates within a generic object desktop. This allows word objects