OLE
The kicker is something called OLE, Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding technology, that can be used to tie the features of different computer programs together. With OLE, the online world is not merely the incredible, globe-spanning, hyper-connected, unbelievably low-cost communications experience that is available through your run-of-the-mill, stand-alone World Wide Web browser today. OLE integrates online with off-line. The Web, Internet email, and all the great things you can do on the Internet become objects to embed in your personal work product.
An Example from School: Want to provide an incredibly thorough and constantly updated bibliography at the end of a term paper? Just drop in a few hypertext links to an Internet search engine, an online encyclopedia and the home page of a leading researcher in the field.
An Example from Business: The report from Accounting has to include the latest figures from Manufacturing. Just insert an object in the report containing the current manufacturing data and a link to the source of the data, so it can be continuously updated over the network. Did I mention that Accounting is in New York and the plant is in Thailand?
An Example Closer to Home: Today I pay my Pacific Bell bill by phone, then enter the same numbers again in Quicken. With OLE I could get my bill by email, then click a button to schedule the payment with my bank and enter the charge into Quicken, even though Microsoft, Intuit, Pacific Bell and my bank have not merged into one giant company. This is fast, it's easy, it's FREE (Pac Bell loves to save all the bill printing, mailing and payment processing costs) and I can tally up exactly how much I spent on long distance calls to each member of my family.
So OLE is potentially really cool. The only problem is, it is really hard to make OLE do things unless a team of expert C programmers at a major software manufacturer figures out how to "OLE enable" the computer programs involved. This is no problem for Microsoft, of course, but what about the rest of us?
People tend to forget that literacy is the ability to both read and write. Computer literacy is no different. It is fundamentally important for people to be able to create as well as consume. Wouldn't you feel slightly oppressed without CB radios and camcorders and a free press?
TOUCH'E
In this spirit, I introduce TOUCH'E. It stands for To Object, Use Common Hypertext. 'S Easy!
Right away, TOUCH'E has some big advantages over OLE. It is independent of Microsoft Windows and every other operating system. It has an attitude—a democratic attitude. Hypertext is phenomenally successful on the World Wide Web thanks to millions of individuals, not one big company.
Normal people stand a chance of actually understanding how TOUCH'E works because it boils down to an extension of normal writing. Everything is in human-readable ASCII text.
Let's go back to the OLE examples above. At the end of the term paper, the links might look like this:
<h1>Bibliography</h1><p>
<a href="http://www.yahoo.com">Internet Search Engine</a><br>
<a href="http://www.britannica.com">Encyclopedia</a><br>
<a href="http://www.expert.edu">Leading Researcher</a>
In the business report, you might have something like:
<h1>Quarterly Report</h1><p>
Profits were higher due to sales of $X million and cost reductions of $Y. <a href = "http://www.acme.com/thailand/mfg.htm">Click here for the latest manufacturing figures.</a>
As for the phone bill example, getting TOUCH'E to actually do things, such as update Quicken, still requires a computer program. But average computer-literate people can write simple computer programs, particularly those called macros. It's getting simple programs to work with other programs, such as a complex piece of personal finance software, that's hard.
OLE solves this problem under the covers by having programs communicate via secret messages; special "spy" software is needed to read the messages. Some programmers even believe that Microsoft abuses the secrecy of these messages to give Microsoft applications a competitive advantage. I'm not making this up! It's part of the antitrust allegations.
TOUCH'E says to get rid of the secrecy (after all, everyone can read and copy HTML source code on the Web) and figure out some simple text messages that will make sense to people as well as to the machines.
For example, I have a little program, called RUN.EXE, that gives my hypertext documents the ability to run other programs (under Windows only, unfortunately, but the concept should work on any computer). Netscape and other browsers permit helper applications to be linked to particular types of files, so I set my copy of Netscape to execute RUN.EXE whenever it encounters a batch file with the extension .BAT.
This gives me the ability to do lots of things using the simple text found in batch files. (Batch files, if you have not used them before, are simply lists of program names, so they say things like "Start this program" or "Start this program using this file" or, best of all, "Start this program and run this macro.") If I could get Pac Bell to send me a copy of my phone bill by email, I could write the following one-line hypertext and two-line batch file to start Quicken and run a macro recorded with the Windows Recorder:
<a href="paybill.bat">Pay Phone Bill</a>
QW
RECORDER QUPDATE.REC
My macro could go through the steps of copying and posting the amount of my bill into Quicken and sending the email reply approving payment. No OLE needed.
OK, eventually the C programmers will figure out how to make this work for millions of people and OLE will make sense. But who wants to wait?
OLE, TOUCH'E!
Related Resources:
Developing Distributed Objects With
CORBA
OpenDoc
Hypertext Theory as if the WWWeb
Matters
Web Sites for HTML Developers