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> 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

> 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...

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...