8 ms·

Xanadu was Ted Nelson's proposed version of a hypertext publishing medium that predates the World Wide Web. (I believe he coined the term "hypermedia", but I co

by mceoin 9y ago

Xanadu was Ted Nelson's proposed version of a hypertext publishing medium that predates the World Wide Web. (I believe he coined the term "hypermedia", but I could be wrong) It is interesting alternative to "what could have been", and inspired the imagination of technologists in the 70s (I believe). It featured some unique elements: - subdivision of "documents" so that sections (sentences, paragraphs) can be folded in from other sources. Somewhat similar to remote CDNs for images, but did chunks of text (e.g. when quoting another article) - UI: being able to see multiple documents at the same time and how they connect to each other. (Not the same as annotation, but if you can imagine seeing annotations on the side of the screen... something like that) - greater similarity to the Memex in how information can be interlinked and displayed. - in built royalty mechanism. (Micro payments) - files are stored centrally in a docuverse, which is somewhat similar to a block chain in that there is an agreed interpretation of what a document "is" instead of having multiple copies of the same document. Ultimately, the World aside Web came along and filled the need for a document publishing medium, rendering Xanadu a historical artifact, many of whose ideas have been realized by other projects in other forms. Wikipedia entry here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu Also worth reading is Literary Machines, since that's an interesting historical read of how people were thinking about uses for computers.

mceoin 9y ago
Correction, looks like he coined the term hypertext, not hypermedia.
dustingetz 9y ago
I read Ted Nelson's autobiography. My impression was he had great visionary scale ideas, but couldn't describe a concrete implementation. I actively sought to understand concretely what Xanadu is and came up empty, a lot of high level words that could mean anything to different people reading them. Nothing concrete, at least that I was capable of understanding in the amount of time I was willing to invest. Nelson's research and vision predates computers and programmers as we know it today, so it makes sense that he wasn't a programmer. Tim Berners Lee was of course a programmer, and wrote in Weaving the Web, "having a working demo is table stakes."
- wolfgke 9y ago
  For an overview of the "user side" read his book "Literary Machines". If you want to understand the technology behind it, consider that there have been two incomplete implementations: Udanax Green and Udanax Gold: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226223053/http://www.udanax.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090226223053/http://www.udanax... (the domain udanax.com now seems now to be used by someone else). The first was based on a data structure called "Enfilade" (http://www.sunless-sea.net/wiki/EntTheory http://www.sunless-sea.net/wiki/EntTheory), which was invented by Roger Gregory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Gregory_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Gregory_(programmer)). Xanadu Gold was based on a data structure called "Ent", which is much more complicated and was according to http://xanadu.com/tech/ http://xanadu.com/tech/ invented by K. Eric Drexler. Understand Enfilades before trying to understand Ents. The best overview of an Ent that I could find (seems incomplete, though) is https://web.archive.org/web/20071027094309/http://www.sunless-sea.net/wiki/Somebody_s%20paper%20on%20the%20Ent https://web.archive.org/web/20071027094309/http://www.sunles...
- specialist 9y ago
  "...he had great visionary scale ideas, but couldn't describe a concrete implementation." I revisit Xanadu every couple of years. For its time, its "closed" architecture seemed reasonable. How else would one implement persistent two-way links? Once you kinda grasp Xanadu, kludges like pingbacks and link liveness checkers seem ridiculous. Alas, Ted Nelson, like myself, didn't anticipate, or was slow to fully appreciate, how DNS, HTTP, URL/URI would up-end the world. Whatever else was going on with Nelson, Xanadu, Autodesk, whatever, "the web" tsunami obliterated competing notions. Animats' comment (below) about git (eg github) being today's closest realization of the Xanadu ideal is insightful.
  - dustingetz 9y ago
    "its "closed" architecture seemed reasonable. How else would one implement persistent two-way links" That's a great example of a concrete implementation detail - unbreakable links means a central link database - that has significant implications in the shape of the vision. For example the only way I can think of to do unbreakable links but also distributed is an immutable public ledger perhaps something like a blockchain. And now we can talk about specifics like what other properties does a blockchain implementation shape? What does a database app with HTML forms and such look like? But did Nelson understand this? Can anyone cite an implementation source that goes into Nelson's analysis of this stuff?
mixedbit 9y ago
Here is an interview in which Ted Nelson explains his vision to Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY The interview is included in 'Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World' documentary. The whole documentary is rather critical of the impact the Internet revolution had on our society, but Herzog seemed to really admire Ted Nelson's alternative vision for the global network.
gvx 9y ago
I've always found it interesting how Xanadu was basically The Right Thing to WWW's Worse Is Better. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)
- mceoin 9y ago
  "Innovation is path dependent", and in the case of the World Wide Web, "done" really was better than perfect.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    > "Innovation is path dependent" Citation needed. Kidding aside, is this paper [0] the source for your quote? Thanks [0] https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/pubpapers/PathDepIER2002.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/pubpapers/PathDepIER2002...
- theamk 9y ago
  ... and in Xanadu's case, The Right Thing requires the documents to be never deleted. I do not think this is a good example of the Worse Is Better principle, it is more like "you must think of a real world when designing systems"
  - gvx 9y ago
    I agree it's not a perfect metaphor. I do think Xanadu is an extreme case of The Right Thing style of thinking, even if Xanadu would never have actually been Right: the creator still thought of it that way, and IMO that is one of the causes for the failure of the project to materialize.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Huh, interesting - sounds similar to the work of Paul Otlet, who sought to...well, there's a biography about him titled, "Cataloging the World." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet He had an idea for a sort of world library/scholarly citadel called The Mundaneum - I wonder what he would've made of computers. Sadly, Wikipedia says that the project lost funding from Belgium a bit before they were invaded by Germany, who broke a lot of it.
olavk 9y ago
Honestly, the site has somewhat of a crackpot-vibe. Only major feature I understand from the site is "visible links", i.e. links displayed as actual lines on the screen. This seems more like a gimmick than a ground-breaking fundamental difference from the Web. Some of the features you mention could perhaps be useful if implemented in a browser extension, e.g. the ability to see/preview linked documents inline. It is useful in IDE's for code navigation, so perhaps also in a browser.

by mceoin 9y ago

mceoin 9y ago

Correction, looks like he coined the term hypertext, not hypermedia.

dustingetz 9y ago

I read Ted Nelson's autobiography. My impression was he had great visionary scale ideas, but couldn't describe a concrete implementation. I actively sought to understand concretely what Xanadu is and came up empty, a lot of high level words that could mean anything to different people reading them. Nothing concrete, at least that I was capable of understanding in the amount of time I was willing to invest. Nelson's research and vision predates computers and programmers as we know it today, so it makes sense that he wasn't a programmer. Tim Berners Lee was of course a programmer, and wrote in Weaving the Web, "having a working demo is table stakes."

wolfgke 9y ago
For an overview of the "user side" read his book "Literary Machines". If you want to understand the technology behind it, consider that there have been two incomplete implementations: Udanax Green and Udanax Gold: https://web.archive.org/web/20090226223053/http://www.udanax.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090226223053/http://www.udanax... (the domain udanax.com now seems now to be used by someone else). The first was based on a data structure called "Enfilade" (http://www.sunless-sea.net/wiki/EntTheory http://www.sunless-sea.net/wiki/EntTheory), which was invented by Roger Gregory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Gregory_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Gregory_(programmer)). Xanadu Gold was based on a data structure called "Ent", which is much more complicated and was according to http://xanadu.com/tech/ http://xanadu.com/tech/ invented by K. Eric Drexler. Understand Enfilades before trying to understand Ents. The best overview of an Ent that I could find (seems incomplete, though) is https://web.archive.org/web/20071027094309/http://www.sunless-sea.net/wiki/Somebody_s%20paper%20on%20the%20Ent https://web.archive.org/web/20071027094309/http://www.sunles...
specialist 9y ago
"...he had great visionary scale ideas, but couldn't describe a concrete implementation." I revisit Xanadu every couple of years. For its time, its "closed" architecture seemed reasonable. How else would one implement persistent two-way links? Once you kinda grasp Xanadu, kludges like pingbacks and link liveness checkers seem ridiculous. Alas, Ted Nelson, like myself, didn't anticipate, or was slow to fully appreciate, how DNS, HTTP, URL/URI would up-end the world. Whatever else was going on with Nelson, Xanadu, Autodesk, whatever, "the web" tsunami obliterated competing notions. Animats' comment (below) about git (eg github) being today's closest realization of the Xanadu ideal is insightful.
- dustingetz 9y ago
  "its "closed" architecture seemed reasonable. How else would one implement persistent two-way links" That's a great example of a concrete implementation detail - unbreakable links means a central link database - that has significant implications in the shape of the vision. For example the only way I can think of to do unbreakable links but also distributed is an immutable public ledger perhaps something like a blockchain. And now we can talk about specifics like what other properties does a blockchain implementation shape? What does a database app with HTML forms and such look like? But did Nelson understand this? Can anyone cite an implementation source that goes into Nelson's analysis of this stuff?

mixedbit 9y ago

Here is an interview in which Ted Nelson explains his vision to Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY The interview is included in 'Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World' documentary. The whole documentary is rather critical of the impact the Internet revolution had on our society, but Herzog seemed to really admire Ted Nelson's alternative vision for the global network.

gvx 9y ago

I've always found it interesting how Xanadu was basically The Right Thing to WWW's Worse Is Better. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)

mceoin 9y ago
"Innovation is path dependent", and in the case of the World Wide Web, "done" really was better than perfect.
- sah2ed 9y ago
  > "Innovation is path dependent" Citation needed. Kidding aside, is this paper [0] the source for your quote? Thanks [0] https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/pubpapers/PathDepIER2002.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/pubpapers/PathDepIER2002...
theamk 9y ago
... and in Xanadu's case, The Right Thing requires the documents to be never deleted. I do not think this is a good example of the Worse Is Better principle, it is more like "you must think of a real world when designing systems"
- gvx 9y ago
  I agree it's not a perfect metaphor. I do think Xanadu is an extreme case of The Right Thing style of thinking, even if Xanadu would never have actually been Right: the creator still thought of it that way, and IMO that is one of the causes for the failure of the project to materialize.

leggomylibro 9y ago

Huh, interesting - sounds similar to the work of Paul Otlet, who sought to...well, there's a biography about him titled, "Cataloging the World." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet He had an idea for a sort of world library/scholarly citadel called The Mundaneum - I wonder what he would've made of computers. Sadly, Wikipedia says that the project lost funding from Belgium a bit before they were invaded by Germany, who broke a lot of it.

olavk 9y ago

Honestly, the site has somewhat of a crackpot-vibe. Only major feature I understand from the site is "visible links", i.e. links displayed as actual lines on the screen. This seems more like a gimmick than a ground-breaking fundamental difference from the Web. Some of the features you mention could perhaps be useful if implemented in a browser extension, e.g. the ability to see/preview linked documents inline. It is useful in IDE's for code navigation, so perhaps also in a browser.