9 ms·
OpenXanadu
- woleium 4y agoWait, what? What does this show? The link goes to an example. The front page of the site says the following, whish doesn't help much: The computer world is not just technicality and razzle-dazzle. It is a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON. We hope for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an additional standard-- electronic documents with visible connections. We propose a new kind of writing-- PARALLEL PAGES, VISIBLY CONNECTED.
- devd00d 4y agoYeah, I dont get it either.
- patrec 4y agoImagine web had actual support for hypertext. Then you couldn't just "hotlink" images, but also "hotlink" (i.e. natively quote, and annotate) textual content, with arbitrary start and end-points. As it is, html can't can't even express the equivalent of margin notes or footnotes, because it has some braindamaged ideas about inline vs block elements and the former can't contain the latter (they changed the nomenclature, but I'm pretty sure the limitation remains).
- tannhaeuser 4y agoSGML, the meta-language on which HTML is based, has entities ie text expansion variables bound to the content of external resources accessed via URLs or file names. So HTML itself doesn't need such mechanisms if it's understood that general markup facilities of SGML are available (which however isn't the case with browsers). XML (XInclude) attempted to establish more granular inclusion of external document fragments via XPath, but failed on the web. Even if HTML had transclusion, what would the use case look like? HTML as a markup vocabulary was introduced for casual academic publishing at CERN, reusing folklore SGML markup elements that were already widely used at the time. You can argue that HTML has been effectively stagnant while everything around it (CSS and JS) was changed ad absurdum to cater for HTML's limitations, but still in an academic setting, you'll use inline citations or block quotes with references to sources, just as HTML is providing.
- davidy123 4y agoYou can do all this with the mostly ignored part of Fielding's REST, HATEOAS. Xanadu has a lot of interesting ideas and Nelson is a visionary, though the idea to visually link works just doesn't work. However, transclusion is an important idea, that is critical for Wikipedia's style of evolution, and will be important as Wikidata and other linked data (semantic web) applications get off the ground. However, the vast majority of the web consists of cheap short cut web sites that aren't much different than dial up systems. AKA start up money grabbing culture trying to carve up every little idea into a unicorn. And once they start carving things up, they sure don't want to collapse it and help create the semantic web, except privately behind the scenes, in creepy surveillance capitalist and other centralizing projects.
- Xanni 4y agoNot just text, either. Other media formats as well, though text was always the first format supported.
- sedatk 4y agoXanadu was the original project in which the term "hypertext" was coined. It's the primary influence over all hypertext things, including HTML. Its intended use was "directly embedded documents" instead of clicking through links. So, this web site just revives that original idea. I agree that its novelty over web model is still questionable, but that's how significant it is.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago>It's the primary influence over all hypertext things, including HTML Is it? Was Tim Berners-Lee influences by Project Xanadu? Was he aware at all?
- themadturk 4y agoTed Nelson was mentioned specifically in his original proposal document, so I would say it had some influence.
- LeonB 4y agoHe was certainly influenced by Ted Nelson and I’d be shocked if he had no awareness of this. He’d have to have been completely naive about the field he was working in, and I don’t think he was naive.
- tannhaeuser 4y agoYou can check yourself by reading TBL's first WWW site [1]. In essence, Ted Nelson (and Vannevar Bush) are referenced in the "History" section, and also for coining the term "Hypertext", but not from the "Technical" [2] and "Standards" [3] sections. [1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html [2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Technical.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Technical.html [3]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/Standards/Overview.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/Standards/Overview.html
- kabes 4y agoI would argue that memex is the primary influence over all hypertext things. The concept was around before Xanadu.
- chipotle_coyote 4y agoIt's a fascinating dead end in the history of hypertext. Ted Nelson has always come across to me as either 51% visionary and 49% crackpot, or the other way 'round. Technically, Xanadu's bidirectional links and document transclusion (e.g., not just including links but whole sections of other web pages in yours) are really interesting. From a copyright standpoint, they're kind of a mess, and an integral idea of Xanadu is essentially being able to make links and embedded microdocuments require micropayments for usage and/or inclusion, which sounds like the kind of thing that people who don't like libertarians use to parody libertarian ideas. And, from a practical standpoint, they've just never gone anywhere -- as far as I can tell, in no small part because Mr. Nelson is apparently impossible to work with. Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 A famous (and infamous) article, "The Curse of Xanadu", on "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing, a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair" (now closer to 50 years and counting): https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ I don't think I'd actually clicked through and seen this demo before, though, which adds some interesting new objections to it on my end -- I find the user experience here ugly and cryptic. I'm sure a much nicer one with these ideas could be made, but it seems oddly telling that Xanadu's proponents think this -- and the Xanadu web site in general -- are great ways to sell the ideas.
- woleium 4y agoSo all in all quite like the sprawling mansion of the same name from the Citizen Kaine film then?
- janv 4y agoMore like Coleridge's unfinished poem Kubla Khan[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan
- spc476 4y agoAs a demo, I can forgive ugly and being a bit cryptic. It's the ramifications that get me. Okay, in the main document, you have a transclusion link to the King James Bible (Genesis 1:1-3). But one of the main points of Xanadu is the bidirectional links, so when you switch to reading the King James Bible, you should also see bidirectional links not only to the document you were just reading ("Xanadoc"), but every other link to the King James Bible in Xanalogical space, and past a few dozen such links, things will get incredibly messy (and a "missed opportunity"---one of the sides documents actually quotes one of the other side documents, yet there's no link).
- asoneth 4y agoOne thing to keep in mind is that Project Xanadu predates the web by a decade or so. Whereas the web settled on simple unidirectional links embedded in linear text documents, Ted Nelson's Xanadu was aiming for bidirectional transclusion and nonlinear documents ("zippered lists"). Reading old papers from Nelson, Engelbart, or Bush is a lot of fun, though it can sometimes take a little work to get into a pre-internet headspace. I don't read very many authors these days who are attempting to rethink fundamental computer interface concepts like that, though there are a few.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- coldblues 4y agoHuge inspiration for many of the features present in tools such as Obsidian, Logseq and Roam Research.
- johnorourke 4y agoI remember reading about the never-ending story of Xanadu in a 1992 issue of Dr Dobbs Journal, which my local newsagent had to order specially for me... no web in those days. Imagine: there will be developers reading this who weren't even born when it was already vapourware!
- EarlKing 4y agoMaybe it's just me, but it feels like Xanadu was always vaporware for a very important reason: It never had a specification concrete enough to implement because its chief architect always came off like a schizophrenic. I can't be alone in thinking that. No one who's read any of the numerous papers and books surrounding this fiasco can walk away thinking it's author is sane. There's just something about that "stream of consciousness" style of all Ted Nelson's papers that point to there being something fundamentally wrong with him. I say all this not to be a dick, mind you, but to point out that when something has been vapoware for decades that maybe it's time to ignore the guy who's at the heart of it and, if there's anything useful in it, move on without him. The world did that as far as hypertext goes. Now if only the world could do that with GNU.
- beckman466 4y ago> its chief architect always came off like a schizophrenic do you realize it's our economic system and the perversion of technology to literally criminalize cooperation and the sharing of information (intellectual property regime (read the book Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu for more) for one of two groups of people (workers and owners)? > Maybe it's just me normalization of an anti-human economy starts from day -9 months (i.e. health/ill-health of the human organism starts and depends on the health of the mother). what has the 'modern world' got to offer those who don't have clean drinking water due to imperialist systems?
- kabes 4y agoTed also got into fights with almost everybody he ever worked with on Xanadu
- 4y ago
- hgazx 4y agoThis crashed the safari tab on my iPhone, lol.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- NonNefarious 4y ago
- Animats 4y agoEverything is pay per view in Xanadu. It's a micropayment model. When you read, you pay, and the payments are distributed, word by word, to all the creators of the input text. It's for storing expensive information in expensive computers to be sold expensively. Think of it as a successor to Mead Data Central, Lexis, and Nexis[1], early centralized and expensive information retrieval systems. (Those are still around, merged into Reed Elsevier, publisher of expensive books and journals.) The technology became cheap enough that such a business model was unnecessary. Although it was considered in the early days of the Web. Early thinking was that you'd have to subscribe to everything, and there would be charges on your Internet bill for each service, like cable TV. You'd pay to subscribe to a search engine. The New York Times went that route successfully, but few others did. I knew some of the people behind Xanadu in the 1980s. They were mostly everything-is-a-market libertarians. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis
- kwatsonafter 4y agoA very informative post. I think a lot of the young people hip to Nelson miss this point. I'm no longer a, "free and open everything" kind of person but Nelson is far more of a BioShock character than you'd think. He's not a baby boomer in any sense; he's a child of Welles, Hawks, and Howard Hughes. I could see him being old enough not to freak out over Birth Of A Nation. God bless that crazy bastard. We used to make Americans so well.
- uncletammy 4y agoIts not about cheap vs expensive. It's about overall incentives within the system. A read should be as valuable as a write. At the very least, a read shouldn't be completely free.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoDepends what I am reading. If it is useful to me, then incentive modelling would suggest I should pay. If I get useless information, then I won't want to pay. If I get advertising, then they should pay. But how do I tell what value I will extract from it before I have read it? Information/concepts/ideas are not like physical objects at all.
- kwatsonafter 4y agoLegend is that at CERN they flipped a coin to decide whether they would choose Xanadu or Tim Berner Lee's WWW as their Hypertext system. That day coins failed us.
- mikewarot 4y agoObviously we're in the worse timeline. We got evil sentient AI was well: "The Algorithm" that runs YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, et al.
- kwatsonafter 4y agoa quote from the system: "Adam and Lilith began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while am to be in the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth." That's just a few seconds of clicking around in systems like this. It's like surfing with a fucking jetpak. Spend a few minutes with the demo and try to, "feel" the concept. I would pay huge amounts of money to have all my research materials, "Xanadu'd." (Anyone looking to be hired?)
- kevinmgranger 4y agoAm I getting the idea behind this correctly? The idea is embedding content in one stream from different sources? It seems like folks here are skeptical, but... we're seeing a growing trend towards this. Nevermind the origins of hypertext, look at the more modern timeline: - tiddlywiki encouraging bite-sized references that stack on top of each other in one view - The growing popularity of digital zettelkasten(s?) such as Roam or Obsidian. Backlink views and embedding snippets are at least similar. - Finally, the block protocol: https://blockprotocol.org/ https://blockprotocol.org/ Is this going to be something where people look back on this and say "if only it had been understood earlier, we'd have had $whatever_is_after_block_protocol sooner" ?
- mikewarot 4y ago>Is this going to be something where people look back on this and say "if only it had been understood earlier, we'd have had $whatever_is_after_block_protocol sooner" ? Yes, in the July, 1945 issue of "The Atlantic", the editor prefixes "As We May Think" with this: As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
- mikewarot 4y agoI think the Memex (er, Xanadu) is an effective Rorschach test to reveal perceptions of the power of computing. Many are happy with the status quo, and see it as overly complex Some see it as evil, like communism. Some see it as hope for the future. Hope that should have arrived half a century ago, at least.
- galaxyLogic 4y agoThis looks truly innovative to me, the way the different text-sources connect. And it seems to work on some level.
- teddyh 4y agoIn 1988, Autodesk (makers of AutoCAD) was so impressed by the Xanadu project that they gave them financial backing, hoping to bring a product to market the following year. After four years without any progress, Autodesk gave up: > […] Come 1992, the “resources of Autodesk” were still funding “talent of the Xanadu team” which had not, as of that date, produced anything remotely like a production prototype—in fact, nothing as impressive as the 88.1x prototype which existed before Autodesk invested in Xanadu. On August 21, 1992 Autodesk decided to pull the plug and give its interest in Xanadu back to the Xanadudes. (Quoted from footnote linked from this page: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_64.html)
- qwerty456127 4y agoHow is this practically useful anyway? How is this better than Roam?
- andrew-jack 4y agoA significant source of motivation for the development of a great deal of the functionality that can be found in programs like as Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam Research.
- nudpiedo 4y agoI hope to see xanadu succeed, even if it is only on some specialized niches. By seeing value on those niches more and more projects and people would understand the benefits of such system and would like to implement it. But I also believe there will be always a space for current webapps, treating links as RPCs against external systems. EDIT: For anyone interested here is Ted Nelson explaining the system in 2008 on an example system implementation of his original idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA