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Dave Thomas of the Open Augment Consortium keynoted today, and — auigh! — his slides are in Comic Sans. (Sidebar for people who don’t regularly read me: I hate Comic Sans.)

We’ve heard the opening before: In the beginning, there was Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think. Then Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect” in 1962. Then Ted Nelson’s “Hypertext” in 1965.

The Augment system is 35 years old. This is the markup of an Augment document:

<ADDRESS : VIEWSPECS ; CAPATTERN;>

He says he doubts that XPath, XQuery and XPointer combined could allow the kind of introspection that Augment does. He went over the innovations in Augment, such as the mouse and chording keypad, multiple windows and fonts, object-oriented editing, video conferencing, the log-based filesystem, among other things that have been picked up on since. (I wonder what Jef Raskin would be saying here if he were invited to talk about the Canon Cat.)

Augment takes a “non-embedded approach”, as opposed to the current edit-and-annotate process with, say, email. Each document, then, stands alone, linked by reference to each other. Quotable: “Most of our technology sucks compared to this system.”

“You have to be willing to make an investment” in a five-finger chording mouse to really get into Augment, he says. “You’re not going to get there with a point-and-click interface.” They’re working on three-button mice and chording keyboards with Logitech as collector’s items and for use with Open Augment.

On to Open Augment: a non-profit corporation formed in 2003, with a mission to preserve the Augment legacy on the Web. It’s looking to reverse-engineer the “essence” of Augment, and redesign it using open standards and Web technologies. They’re using modern interfaces (i.e., the browser) using the MVC and HTTP interfaces, and it should integrate with things like instant messaging.

Thomas complains that the core standards (XLink, SVG, XUL, etc.) are not commonly implemented. He says the vendors say (and I paraphrase) yeah, welcome to XML utopia, linking not supported. (Good point.)

On the first release of Open Augment: “We’ve all agreed on the wrong way to do it.”

Thomas took a shot at SOAP as a technology that was designed to be so complex that only Microsoft and IBM could implement it. (Another satisfied XML-RPC customer?)

He asks, “Why is it so complicated? Why is there so much stuff?”, when the Augment system took seven people three years to implement. (I think this is an easy one to answer. Don’t you?)

Open Augment is selling a DVD of the Engelbart demo of Augment from lo these many hears ago. They’re looking for a number of people to review and help author for Open Augment, integrate subsystems and file formats, alternative clients, etc., and to contribute. He appealed to new developers: “We’re losing the people who made our industry,” he says, enumerating the people who have died recently. Engelbart is still around (and has an office at Logitech), but is in less-than-perfect health. He wants to get more people involved to continue the work.

I’ve seen a few of this style of presentation now. Someone comes up and says, “I don’t know much about your technology, but it can’t do what this stuff does.” While there’s a lot of value to evangelizing the work of a pioneer one idolizes, I’m really tired of going to conferences to hear “all the stuff you’re doing sucks.” It’s a very divisive approach, often causing others who are otherwise sympathetic to tune out. Yes, we know that Ted Nelson-esque hypertext advocates aren’t happy with the state of the world. Now go out there and offer Open Augment as a bridge to better hypertext, without going over the top and proposing a world-changer.

But that’s just my impression as an infrequent follower of the hypertext world who doesn’t really have any vested interest to speak of in the outcome. Go check out Open Augment and figure it out for yourselves.