4 ms·
Ted's original vision for Xanadu was fairly complete. As I recall, documents would have been effectively immutable; every change you made would publish a new ve
by db48x 7y ago
Ted's original vision for Xanadu was fairly complete. As I recall, documents would have been effectively immutable; every change you made would publish a new version, and all old versions would remain accessible. Every link and transclusion went to a specific version, so they would never break. If the page you were transcluding changed, you could obviously opt to update your own page to transclude the new version, if you wanted. The exact details for payments were never worked out as far as I know, but they would have required every user and every publisher to have a single specific identity which would be transmitted along with every document and request for a document. I'm fairly glad that didn't happen, at any rate.
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoThe versioning makes sense -- but it seems like it could get unwieldy pretty quickly. (I'm thinking of the technical documentation site I actually work on, with thousands of pages, several of which get minor-to-significant updates on a weekly basis!) It also sounds like a design particularly ill-suited to, say, a news site with a front page that changes several times a day -- or, for that matter, a site like Hacker News -- although I suppose the notion of one-way "jump links" might have been the intended answer? And, yes, the mandatory identity for all users sounds like a potential privacy nightmare.
- db48x 7y agoIt would have been different, no doubt about that. However, it's not like we don't already version everything internally. Wikis keep every edit in the revision history, we put all our code in git, etc. Even back in the day VMS systems had a version number as part of every file name, with the OS automatically keeping past versions of every file. It's just that there's no version field in our standard url syntax, so there's no standardized way of using retrieving those versioned documents.