3 ms·

Related, Ted Nelson recently posted a series of videos describing the important ideas on Xanadu, the original hypertext project: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h

Related, Ted Nelson recently posted a series of videos describing the important ideas on Xanadu, the original hypertext project: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac# https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac#

hinkley 8y ago
There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild. The closest analogs I know of are, ironically enough, tools for software developers. We can take this farther. There are a lot of people trying to raise the bar on development tools and at least some of us believe that people tend to do what they know. What is demonstrated for them. Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things with them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level. There are several aspects of code comprehension that I think would be conducive to his designs. And monitors are getting wide enough now that we nearly have the space to do them.
- jancsika 8y ago
  > There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild. Go to Ted Nelson's Wikipedia page and mouse over the "Project Xanadu" link. > Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things with them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level. The value of Wikipedia page previews has very little to do with the quality of the technology. The quality of the technology is perfectly adequate for at least one version of what Ted Nelson is describing. The value is determined by what those tooltips are legally allowed to link-- can they show all primary documents which anyone on HN can trivially discover and access in a digital format, or can they merely show other Wikipedia pages? As long as it is illegal to link at least primary documents that whose authorship was funded by public money (like everything on Scihub), it really doesn't matter what type of view or even doc format you have.
  - setr 8y ago
    that may not be entirely true; if you imagined a universe where xanadu exists, and was popular as a general tool, then you can envision that open-source primary documents would be preferred over closed, simply on the basis that you can actually consistently link to them (in the same fashion that, today, non-paywalled sites are naturally favored over paywall for sharing on HN). And if xanadu documents were more useful (because of their interlinking and history) than the close-able flat documents (or perhaps closed documents that only link to closed source), then naturally things would slowly trend towards open documents by default, as it becomes more difficult to constrain yourself to the closed-source world. The problem today might be then, that everyone already accepts that primary documents are likely to be sealed off, and there's no significant incentive otherwise. But if the idea of having a sufficiently useful document upgraded from a flat pdf to a historically-archiving xanadu document...
nabla9 8y ago
Ted Nelson had great ideas but he totally screwed up the delivery. He insisted total control over ZigZag. He wanted it to exist as proprietary software not open protocol or anything like that. Decades passed noting came for his ideas and software. Then came the web, html, RDFs etc. and Ted Nelson became desperate. He received patent for zzstructure in 2001. When group of talented individuals approached him he first approved their work in GZZ (Gnu ZigZag) then he screwed them totally over when they started to get work done. Ted Nelson's genius is voided by his insecurities, greed or something. Maybe when his patent expires 2021 something will come of it. http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/ http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/

hinkley 8y ago

There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild. The closest analogs I know of are, ironically enough, tools for software developers. We can take this farther. There are a lot of people trying to raise the bar on development tools and at least some of us believe that people tend to do what they know. What is demonstrated for them. Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things with them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level. There are several aspects of code comprehension that I think would be conducive to his designs. And monitors are getting wide enough now that we nearly have the space to do them.

jancsika 8y ago
> There is almost nothing like his ideas out in the wild. Go to Ted Nelson's Wikipedia page and mouse over the "Project Xanadu" link. > Give them crappy tools and they will be satisfied to create crappy things with them. Give someone a better tool and many will rise to that level. The value of Wikipedia page previews has very little to do with the quality of the technology. The quality of the technology is perfectly adequate for at least one version of what Ted Nelson is describing. The value is determined by what those tooltips are legally allowed to link-- can they show all primary documents which anyone on HN can trivially discover and access in a digital format, or can they merely show other Wikipedia pages? As long as it is illegal to link at least primary documents that whose authorship was funded by public money (like everything on Scihub), it really doesn't matter what type of view or even doc format you have.
- setr 8y ago
  that may not be entirely true; if you imagined a universe where xanadu exists, and was popular as a general tool, then you can envision that open-source primary documents would be preferred over closed, simply on the basis that you can actually consistently link to them (in the same fashion that, today, non-paywalled sites are naturally favored over paywall for sharing on HN). And if xanadu documents were more useful (because of their interlinking and history) than the close-able flat documents (or perhaps closed documents that only link to closed source), then naturally things would slowly trend towards open documents by default, as it becomes more difficult to constrain yourself to the closed-source world. The problem today might be then, that everyone already accepts that primary documents are likely to be sealed off, and there's no significant incentive otherwise. But if the idea of having a sufficiently useful document upgraded from a flat pdf to a historically-archiving xanadu document...

nabla9 8y ago

Ted Nelson had great ideas but he totally screwed up the delivery. He insisted total control over ZigZag. He wanted it to exist as proprietary software not open protocol or anything like that. Decades passed noting came for his ideas and software. Then came the web, html, RDFs etc. and Ted Nelson became desperate. He received patent for zzstructure in 2001. When group of talented individuals approached him he first approved their work in GZZ (Gnu ZigZag) then he screwed them totally over when they started to get work done. Ted Nelson's genius is voided by his insecurities, greed or something. Maybe when his patent expires 2021 something will come of it. http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/ http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/