Someone (*ahem*) sent me an article to review with over 150 outbound hyperlinks.

I didn’t have a web browser that supported a viable model of hyper-reading, and get overwhelmed when I have more than 100 tabs open. My first thought was to render all of the links into a book or a giant poster or something. Unfortunately, there were some multi-hundred page PDFs, and the subject matter precluded wanton wasteful resource consumption on my part. My next thought was to render out a video where scrolling through the article would also scroll through all of the hyperlinks, so I wrote a phantomjs script to download and render all of the links to pngs. In order to prototype the video, I used my matrix-based livecoding environment to throw up the images side by side, and before I knew it—adding in some mouse handling by pure reflex—I had accidentally created a peculiar web browser thing.

Today, Tristan sent me a link that itself contained many links, so I loaded it in my hyperbind browser and recorded a short screencast of myself browsing through. Like in a book, reading is bounded: you get all the links, but you don’t get the links’s links. Links links links links links links links. Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. I rather like the collision of scrolling and opening links in a single gesture. It’s also nice that it runs at 30FPS; all of links have been pre-downloaded, so there’s no latency when links open, much like using a book. 

Your correspondent,

R.M.O.