On Permalinks and Paradigms...
There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us - so seemingly obvious - that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here's a case in point - the weblog post's permalink. I mean - let's think about it. The problem was that a weblog's front page is by far its most visited page. This is the page where everyone actually sees your content (or at least it was until the creation of RSS feeds). But it's not possible for someone to effectively bookmark or link to that particular entry on that page, because shortly it will scroll off the bottom. Added to that, bookmarks operate at the level of pages, not posts. So how do you handle that? How can you make it possible for people to link to something with a higher level of granularity than just the page? Moreover, how can you get them to link to something that's not actually on the page you're looking at?
I remember when permalinks were invented - or at least, I remember when the concept was applied to Blogger weblogs in roughly its current form. After some digging around, I've found Paul Bausch's post on Blogger's weblog from March 2000. In the post, he referred to them just as "permanent links" - I believe it was Matt Haughey who coined the term 'permalink', but I could be wrong. I've researched both their sites, but I've found little commentary about them...
When permalinks first emerged, I was highly dismissive of them. I felt really uncomfortable with how hacky they seemed. Late-1999 / early-2000 was quite a creative time for people making weblog-related toys and paraphenalia. The concept of the permalink had all the signs of being equally useless and badly thought-through. For a start, it required yet more clutter on the weblog-page. The designer in me railed against them. But more than that, they seemed to be a kind of weird abomination - a sin against what links were there to do. Clicking on a permalink didn't take you anywhere, you just ended up roughly where you were before, only in a more stable form. Sometimes (assuming you were already inside a site's archives) clicking on a permalink would even take you to the same place on the same page you were before. At the time I honestly didn't believe that they'd take off - that anyone would use them. But of course they did...
But why did it take off? What was so important about the permalink? It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else's site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And - as a result - friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs. It existed way before Trackback and I think it's been more fundamental to our development as a culture than comments... Not only that, it added history to weblogs as well - before you'd link to a site's front page if you wanted to reference something they were talking about - that link would become worthless within days, but that didn't matter because your own content was equally disposable. The creation of the permalink built-in memory - links that worked and remained consistent over time, conversations that could be archived and retraced later. The permalink stopped all weblog conversations being like that guy in Memento...
And yet no one seems to remember much about their creation. At the time they were a tiny paradigm shift in a tiny community of committed web-weirdos. No one thought that they might be one of the fundamental structuring principles of half a million sites. And so no one's really written about them. No one's really researched their creation. And no one's given Paul Bausch and the Blogger crew the mad props they deserve. It's probably time we did something about that...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Interesting thoughts... I can't remember permalinks not being around. I guess someone must have been using them before Blogger decided to spend time on implementing them -- I wonder who used them first?
→ Posted by: Phil at June 11, 2003 10:03 AM
I remember at the time (before the term 'permalinks' was coined) I suggested to the team at Pyra they should build 'persistent references' which is a term I picked up from the CMT we used at work.
→ Posted by: Caroline at June 11, 2003 11:03 AM
Hear, hear. I'm sure you'll find older forms of the concept in different sorts of sites, though - at least this concept of wrapping an explicit link to an a-name tag around the tag itself, creating a link that seems to 'go nowhere'. I used it in my online novel in mid-1999, placing bookmark icons in each natural break in a page so that readers could return there without having to scroll through. So the appearance of permalinks in blogs didn't seem as unusual or discomforting to me.
→ Posted by: Rory at June 11, 2003 01:20 PM
I found this post on my site from early March 2000, where I proposed a hack for blogger, so that permalinks worked on the index page. After I wrote this up, pb coded the variable (or whatever it was called) so that real permalinks could happen.
I think people think I made up the term because I started using it at MetaFilter. here's a typical page from that time, thanks to the archive.org. I believe I had them going a few months earlier, but this was the first reference I could find at the archive.
I distinctly remember hearing the word "permalink" somewhere else and using it on MetaFilter. I used to get a steady stream of questions asking me if it was ok for others to use the term and I always said yeah, sure I didn't make it up anyway. I can't recall where I first heard it or saw it in action (kottke's site might be the first use, dunno who called it a permalink).
→ Posted by: Matt Haughey at June 11, 2003 05:03 PM
Also Tom, you breezed by one more key fundamental thing permalinks allowed. In the weblog book I contributed to we repeatedly state how blogs are built on a post paradigm instead of a page paradigm that the web was originally built upon.
I really think permalinks made that distinction clear and allowed the by-post model to blossom. It made every contribution to a site behave like a distinct unit that could be linked to, quoted from, and extracted. It is funny how we don't even think about it anymore.
→ Posted by: Matt Haughey at June 11, 2003 05:12 PM
btw, here's Kottke's reference to when he added permalinks
→ Posted by: Matt Haughey at June 11, 2003 05:17 PM
Two observations - The more initial scanning of weblogs is done in an aggregator, the less multiple posts per page format matters. Short posts don't require navigation. For long posts the reader may as well go directly to the permanent page. Soon "permalink" may just be, well, "link". - Why don't comments have permalinks? Seems to me the short bolt-on history of weblogs has lead to a Ptolemaic system centered on the "post" while the greater conversation is relegated to epicyclic hacks like comments, Trackback and ThreadsML.
→ Posted by: Rick Thomas at June 11, 2003 06:21 PM
According to some of the things I looked up recently, Caroline's prompt is what caused the postID to be implemented by PB as permalinks in Blogger. So Caroline was definitely the inspiration and I see PB as being the father of permalinks.
→ Posted by: Anil at June 11, 2003 07:04 PM
(I mentioned this the other day here.)
→ Posted by: Anil at June 11, 2003 07:06 PM
Oops, bad URL. Try this:
http://waffle.wootest.net/iron/anil_dash.php
→ Posted by: Anil at June 11, 2003 07:07 PM
Anil beat me to it.
→ Posted by: Jesper at June 11, 2003 07:58 PM
In the Random Footnotes to History Department, there's an Evhead post from October 2000 about the Permalink–Timestamp Merger: "To make way for the comments icon, I got rid of the permalink icon and made the timestamp the permalink. I think this is a good idea that will hopefully become rather standard so people will know to look for it and blog publishers won't have to clutter up their design with "link" after each post." Which begs the important question: has time become any more permanent in the years since? (Or, alternately, what comments icon?) In any case, vive la revolucion!
→ Posted by: Lock at June 11, 2003 08:29 PM
And while we're at it, a link to me cracking wise about Kottke's permalinks back in April of 2000.
Back then I actually thought that XLink and XPointer would happen sometime in my lifetime and we'd be able to link to arbitrary nodes inside of documents on the web. Ha ha, jokes on us.
→ Posted by: Stewart Butterfield at June 11, 2003 08:30 PM
"what comments icon?"
Ah yes, for a brief time Blogger had comments in the first version of Blogger Pro (Q4, 2000). They were hosted on Blogger.com and loaded via JavaScript on a site. They were unstable and basically unusable, and thus disappeared, never, it seems, to return again.
→ Posted by: megnut at June 11, 2003 08:37 PM
It's not quite true that "[n]o one's really researched them." Tantek and Pilgrim have written on the topic.
http://tantek.com/log/2002/12.html#blog20021231t1332
http://tantek.com/log/2002/11.html#blog20021128t1352
I am now following their advice and using rel="bookmark" on everything, for example.
And many Weblogs do have permalinks for comments-- Cf. Pilgrim again. Remember, the fragment identifier id="", which can go on essentially anything, is your friend. The Web is made up of fragments (small, loosely joined); _id_ lets you identify them.
→ Posted by: Joe Clark at June 11, 2003 10:00 PM
It should be noted, for the record, that Netscape 4 does not recognize id attributes as anchors, only name. This has not stopped me from relying on id almost exclusively, even in HTML 4.
It should also be noted that id attributes can not validly start with a digit, but name attributes can.
And finally, at the risk of spinning this discussion into the flaming pit of blogospheric hell, when did UserLand tools support the equivalent of permanent links, and what did they call them?
→ Posted by: Mark Pilgrim at June 11, 2003 10:21 PM
I just checked my old archives. I wasn't using "permalinks" for each post but I was using anchors for each day's posts because I was storing my archives in a monthly format back then. Looks like I started doing this January 2, 1998 when I moved to a new site design.
→ Posted by: Cam Barrett at June 11, 2003 11:31 PM
I went back and looked through archived email to see if I could track down more information. Apparently, permalinks was seen as a *minor* improvement and barely worth comment. We were working on so many features at that time that were much more complicated...remote editing, something called an item bookmarklet, getting the flood of new blogs into the directory ;). It's too bad the orignial Blogger forum is gone, that probably has the story. I think it's tough to credit any one person for any Blogger feature--Pyra was an atmosphere of ideas. It was created by everyone working there, and from listening intently to ideas from people using Blogger.
→ Posted by: pb at June 11, 2003 11:40 PM
Actually, the W3C spec sez:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#adef-id
("Note that this attribute shares the same name space as the id attribute.")
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#adef-name-A
Then:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-name
ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be
followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"),
underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
According to this, those lovely Blogger anchors are invalid. We knew that already, of course, and it could have been fixed three versions ago.
(Let's see how the autoformat daemon handles this much pasted text.)
→ Posted by: Joe Clark at June 12, 2003 02:54 AM
i wasnt blogging back in 2000 so i definitely dont remember the creation of permalinks. but i am amazed that someone even thought of inventing them. they are very useful.
→ Posted by: kari at June 12, 2003 03:27 AM
Although not related to history of permalinks, this article at BlogStreet talks about how the majority of blog apps / tools still deny their existence.
The point made in Blog Post Analysis is that blog-posts and not just web-pages are the fundamental units of weblogs.
→ Posted by: VeerChand Bothra at June 12, 2003 08:31 AM
Tangential : I love you guys (no, really) but you _are_ funny, thinking so earnestly about who first made that evolutionary cognitive breakthrough and pushed it to the next level by contracting the words 'permanent link' to 'permalink.' Whoever it was, they better build some statues of him or her someday, by golly! (Shoulders of giants, I know, I know. I'm just being snarky...)
→ Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at June 12, 2003 12:37 PM
Hmm. I think that's being a bit mean, actually. I think for some of us it's more like nostalgia. So there you go - I said it out loud - doing a weblog then was different to how it is now. Not better or worse, but different - it was a small hobbyist activity. I think there's an extent to which many of us have feelings of nostalgia for a period when pretty much everyone knew everyone, when someone starting a new weblog was a cause for celebration and when we all started to realise that something cool was actually happening. Give us old timers a bit of a chance to grumble on about how there's nothing good on TV any more, eh?
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at June 12, 2003 12:52 PM
I don't mean to be mean, honestly. I'd have stuck in some smilies, but, well, you know... Grumble on, old-timers! We wouldn't be here, having all this fun, doing all this mad crap, without you.
→ Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at June 12, 2003 12:56 PM
Ummm, Slashdot was doing permalinks several years before Blogger was invented.
If your data structure treats the Post as a first class object, then it's reasonable to write a function to display a Post on its own page - and given that function, you might as well link to it.
→ Posted by: Pete Bevin at June 12, 2003 02:31 PM
I'm not sure that's the same thing Pete. The distinction of the permalink isn't that each post can be displayed on its own page and therefor have a URL. It's that each post is a discrete object -- with its own link -- within the context *of* a page.
→ Posted by: megnut at June 12, 2003 03:57 PM
Mark, permalinks came into Manila along with News Item Oriented sites in May 2000. The feature was patterned after Slashdot. Brent Simmons did the work. Look at this page, scroll down to Beer. About flames, the best way to avoid them is not to start. Have a nice day.
→ Posted by: Dave Winer at June 12, 2003 09:31 PM
I actually began my blog without permalinks even though they were available because I wanted to keep the feeling of time passing of not going back. But as the months plodded on I realised that some of the writing I was most proud of was being lost in the archives (and in some ways still is ... Blogger still won't recreate the actual pages for the eight months worth of work from last July to the end of this February). So I when I decided to link to some representative entries on the front page it was obvious and clear that I'd need to add them in, and I'm pleased I did.
→ Posted by: Stuart Ian Burns at June 12, 2003 10:50 PM
Dave, unless I'm misreading the News Item docs, the URL of the News Item isn't intended to be a permanent link to the posting itself, but a link to something the posting is about, correct?
→ Posted by: Michael Bernstein at June 12, 2003 11:25 PM
Hang on a second, though. In the first paragraph, you say "it's not possible for someone to effectively bookmark or link to that particular entry on that page, because shortly it will scroll off the bottom."
That's only if the blog URL doesn't change. A better
fix than permalinks would be to make http://blog.com/
redirect to http://blog.com/timestamp. That way, bookmarking -just works-.
This doesn't require fancy server stuff either --
a META redirect in the document will do it.
Your first instinct was right, I think. Permalinks,
as currently used, are a grotty hack.
→ Posted by: Theo H at June 16, 2003 07:38 PM
Redirection from http://blog.com/ redirect to http://blog.com/timestamp has it's own problems though.
It means you can't ever bookmark the front page of the site (at least, not without rewriting the bookmark).
It also means that you're assuming that a timestamp (which will presumably display the postings in reverse chronological order for that day, and use a named anchor to point to a specific posting in that day) is functionally equivalent to all uses of permalinks, which is definitely *not* the case. Many weblogs use the permalink as a unique URL for the individual posting, and don't include any other postings in that view.
→ Posted by: Michael Bernstein at June 17, 2003 02:47 AM
It looks like Manila didn't have real permalinks until Sept 19, 2001. Previous to that, they were all funky, pointing at general titles instead of each (often unrelated) element beneath, like a true permalink should.
→ Posted by: Matt Haughey at June 18, 2003 04:47 PM
Matt, that's the right date for item-level permalinks, but according to Dave's post today, he's had top-level blue arrow permalinks since June 18th, 2000. The anchors don't seem to be working too well for some reason, though.
→ Posted by: Michael Bernstein at June 18, 2003 11:55 PM
Right, Michael, that's why I called his title and date permalinks funky. For example, look at this random day from 2000 on his site. The first 5 or 6 posts have no title, so there's no way I can link to the third paragraph and link down (which is unrelated to things above and below it). True permalinks treat every discrete chunk as a discrete object, and Manila has that today, but didn't until Sept. of 2001
→ Posted by: Matt Haughey at June 19, 2003 07:05 PM
Try PurpleSlurple for granular addressability on-the-fly: http://www.purpleslurple.net.
In fact try it on this page: http://purpleslurple.net/ps.php?theurl=http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/06/on_permalinks_and_paradigms.shtml
Then thank Doug Engelbart for the granular addressability concept as implemented on computers (circa 1968). Perhaps conceived earlier by Ted Nelson.
I suppose some monks get credit for the idea when they started numbering the paragraphs of the Bible.
→ Posted by: Matthew A. Schneider at July 10, 2003 06:29 AM