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It'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 'rou
by chipotle_coyote 4y ago
It'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).
- Xanni 4y agoNote that since Xanadu links and transclusions are external, you can select which linkbases to show. So you can filter them, which is important because otherwise you will surely end up with an unlimited number of links on every single character. :) If the system is working correctly, you should always be able to follow transcluded quotations back to their original primary source - that is one of the most fundamental design principles. Conversely, the rightsholder of a document should be able to see where their work is being quoted.