11 ms·

Xanadu: we have a working deliverable

210 points by tagrun 12y ago

audiodude 12y ago
Upvoted for pure hilarious insanity.
- Semiapies 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu Though I'm not sure you're wrong.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  The spacebar is our control key. spacebar + up-arrow or down-arrow: NEXT SEGMENT spacebar + left-arrow or right-arrow: - step onto bridge, see sourcedoc and xanadoc side by side This plus the fact that the proof-of-concept of a thing 40 years in the making doesn't work without Javascript is truly insane.
Duhveed 12y ago
w.t.f.?
madsushi 12y ago
This is actually a pretty cool way to do annotated sources. While the explanatory page is a bit eccentric, it looks like some fun tech.
benigeri 12y ago
What is this?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- tagrun 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
straws 12y ago
For those uninitiated, this is the Duke Nukem Forever of hypertext: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings. And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was supposed to save the world.
- jere 12y ago
  The website makes it look like the Time Cube of hypertext. http://www.timecube.com/ http://www.timecube.com/
  - jafaku 12y ago
    What's that? I don't get it.
    - percentcer 12y ago
      If you did get it you'd want to see a psychiatrist.
    - nnq 12y ago
      To make it even worse: <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 11">
    - fennecfoxen 12y ago
      Time Cube is a site by Gene Ray, the self-proclaimed "wisest human". For some reason he thinks the way we should be thinking about the day-cycle is to imagine a cube around the earth, with one edge above daybreak, noon, nightfall, and midnight, for "four simultaneous twenty-four hour days". (He uses the term 'corner' instead of edge.) If you don't get why this is a fundamental breakthrough and the only way to look at the world, he will call you "educated stupid" and a dupe in an ongoing conspiracy theory featuring the usual villains of the Western world, especially academia and religion (and Wikipedia, which will have very little of him). For instance, something about the opposites-in-balance philosophy attached to the "time cube" representation is asserted to be fundamentally incompatible with monotheism. Anyway, ranting about this comprises the bulk of his site(s). That and racial-conflict armageddon if you make your way onto later pages. So - a pretty normal crank after a certain point, but in some ways his website it's sort of THE canonical crank website because of its spectacularly rant-y incoherence and awesome web design.
muaddirac 12y ago
It's impressive that it can run in a browser now. When I try in chrome on OSX, the main document fails to load text. Still, with a little more polish, I could see actually using this (a fully annotated, interactive wikipedia would be a neat demo).
fiatjaf 12y ago
"Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
EGreg 12y ago
Well, decades later they build this, but the question is, why use it when we have iframes and links among the html elements? And this: STRANGE RESTRICTION-- because of Web security rules (a complex maze), a web page cannot request pages from elsewhere. So we have to package all the contents into this first program. It's called the CORS security model. Maybe someone doesn't want pages to embed their stuff?
- captainmuon 12y ago
  It is actually a pretty strange restriction, if you look at it from some distance. I remember back then, when "mashups" were all the craze, I spent a weekend writing a website that parsed another site - forgot what it was actually about - and displayed it in a nice way. It worked perfectly offline, but failed online. That was the first time I heard about the same-origin policy. The whole web security model grew organically and unplanned. Pages have access to your state and credentials, but are blocked from accessing other domains - but only under certain circumstances (e.g. loading scripts, or sending information is OK, just not "applying" your credentials). Retrospectively, it would have been much more sensible to allow scripts to access arbitrary HTTP (or even socket) addresses, but without sending cookies and credentials along when doing so. There is just so much awesome stuff you can't build now because of that. Server-less RSS readers, a Wikipedia "shell", legally or politically sensitive mashups/JS apps hosted on some anonymous freehoster, and so on.
  - chillingeffect 12y ago
    ugh, I hear ya! I, too, built a handful of wildly-powerful active pages... I was inspired by the decks from Neuromancer... I was able to scrape pages, combine multiple pages, but it all fell apart when I ran into xss... It could still be done via proxy...
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Tel Aviv startup http://tomodo.com http://tomodo.com runs a proxy that hosts mashup "mods", e.g. a mashup that injects price history into Amazon pages http://www.amazon-camelizer.tomodo.me/Kindle-Fire-HDX-Display-Wi-Fi/dp/B00CUTT4HY/ http://www.amazon-camelizer.tomodo.me/Kindle-Fire-HDX-Displa... Some discussion here, apparently only the cross-domain traffic goes via the proxy https://github.com/TOMODOcom/TOMODOkorz/issues/3 https://github.com/TOMODOcom/TOMODOkorz/issues/3
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Oh wow, and just as I was rereading the (in)famous "Curse of Xanadu" article: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html EDIT: Wait, is there anything new here? Hasn't OpenXanadu been around for a while?
sergiotapia 12y ago
I have absolutely no idea what this is, and the wikipedia link below doesn't help. What is this supposed to be/do? I just see an image loading.
keeperofdakeys 12y ago
Xanadu in concept is crazy, a system of documents that aren't just linked via hyperlinks, but where the actual content was linked between different documents. Unfortunately, after many, many times to develop it, it fell on the way-side. It makes this news quite interesting. I strongly recommend people to read this wired article about it http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html. Also some responses to the article. one from someone from Project Xanadu http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  ...except that this release doesn't actually support links, which makes it a bit pointless. Maybe in another 40 years... - links, connections and relations (XANALINKS-- NOT YET) - shared content between xanadocs (MUTUAL TRANSCLUSION, NOT YET)
- _delirium 12y ago
  Some form of transclusion is used in a reasonable number of hypertext systems, including Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion
hrttrht 12y ago
It's clearly another site by the time cube guy.
GuiA 12y ago
To the confused HNers: Xanadu is a project by Ted Nelson. Ted Nelson is a fundamental figure of early computing (despite not being a computer scientist himself). His work (recommended: Dream Machines/Computer Lib, 1974; Literary Machines, 1981; Geeks Bearing Gifts, 2008) is about how computers touch us as humans, and how they affect our future, especially when it comes to communicating and using them to spread+build knowledge and ideas. When Nelson wrote his first essays, very few people had the insight or knowledge to really understand what he was going on about. Nelson came from a movie acting/storywriting/literary background, and this allowed him to establish parallels and formulate ideas that no one at the time could have done. I would argue that even today, some of his finer points still hold deep relevance and are yet unknown from the general computing crowd. Ted Nelson remains a fairly unknown figure in computing, partly because he never wrote much code/developed products/worked in traditional research groups himself (a major misstep in a field where you tend to be mostly recognized for the projects you ship or papers you publish), and because a lot of his ideas were replaced by ideas that are much more simple to implement and make viable. A lot of hackers do like to ridicule him for those reasons, which I think is a mistake - despite those shortcomings, his body of work is still full of ideas and theories that you won't find anywhere else. You can almost see a second, parallel path that computing could have taken in the 70s. (Nelson was respected by many more famous computer scientists, including for example Alan Kay) That's where Xanadu comes in: Xanadu is an implementation for Nelson's vision for hypertext (which predates the hypertext we know by more than a decade or so). His hypertext is much deeper than Berners-Lee's: notably, it is based on 2-way links (so not only can a page link to other pages, but you can also see which pages link to that page), a deep version system (so that you can access past versions of webpages), stronger "linking" (no such thing as "broken links" in Xanadu), etc. Of course one can see why this is much harder to implement at scale than the web we have now. Nonetheless, Nelson has been working on it through the years, as evidenced by this release. PS: if you do start searching the web for material about Ted Nelson, do not start with the Wired article about him from a decade or so ago. It is terrible. I quite like his YouTube videos, but they require to be familiar with his work (or at least his rhetoric style) already. I think "Geeks Bearing Gifts" is the best foray into Nelson's style - and it is short enough that one can read it quickly. Then, if you want to really get into the meat of his stuff, dive into his other books.
- 12y ago
mike415 12y ago
Next RapGenius
- captainmuon 12y ago
  Actually, RapGenius is the realized, "worse is better" version of Xanadu. It takes the simple idea of annotated hypertext and runs with it, and doesn't bother with all this unusual things like panning, backlinks, excerpts, and so on. That's why RapGenius is successful, and Xanadu is still vaporware. OTOH, I don't think this is even supposed to come out. It's rather a demonstration of some pretty interesting, advanced (and thus also failable) ideas. It reminds me a lot of Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" ideas.
pfraze 12y ago
This is actually a rather neat visualization. If you open the demo and wait (and wait) you'll eventually get a document that's assembled from different texts. Hold down the space bar and press up/down to scroll through it. Each time you scroll, you land on another segment. If it's a segment from the left, press space+left to shift over to it. Likewise, space+right to go to the right. Mouse scroll also works for smaller increments, and you can also click on the parallel documents. Other than the visualization, I'm unsure how much it really accomplishes. The recent submission, the Leo editor [1], follows a similar premise but for a much more interesting result: to generate python code. Leo is also an IDE; this is appears to just be a renderer. 1 http://leoeditor.com/ http://leoeditor.com/
- e12e 12y ago
  Thanks for the help-text -- and the heads up about leo being (recently) posted here. I remember having a look some 10? years ago, nice to see it's still alive! leo submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843907
philliphaydon 12y ago
I don't understand how to read the website...
sp332 12y ago
Some discussion and several lectures expounding on Nelson's ideas, from earlier this year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639599 or "Ted Nelson's computing paradigms expressed as one-liners" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771992
gfodor 12y ago
behold, the leaky-ist of abstractions
softbuilder 12y ago
I have heard of Ted Nelson and Xanadu over the years. But I really don't understand what I'm looking at. Could someone compare and contrast with a more contemporary effort such as Federated Wiki?
- rsl7 12y ago
  you're looking at quotations and inclusion being transactional links instead of copy/paste. These links possibly involve micropayments. iirc, for Ted Nelson, this had the side effect of solving the copyright problem (for text, I guess) when viewing a document = following all the links to include quotations and other inclusions = micropayments. Or at least that's what I remember from Literary Machines.
drcode 12y ago
He should have followed the "release early and often" mantra and released a version every decade, and then iterated based on user feedback. Instead, by waiting an entire 40 years, the beta seems to have some obvious usability issues that a more frequent once-per-decade release schedule would have caught early on.
- Someone 12y ago
  But he did. There was a Windows 95 release in 1998 (http://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html http://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.htm... is the best 'link' I can find to it. If you can find it, you should read the license present inside the installer)
- enkiv2 12y ago
  There was a release in 1993, a complete open source release of all code developed during the 80s at autodesk in 1999, a release around 2003, a windows demo in 2007, and this latest release. There were some intellectual-property-related delays, mostly related to either unfiled patents (wherein the ideas were under trade secret protection until the patent applications were filed) or due to the difficulty of convincing all developers involved to agree to a release. Having too many developers and not getting them to agree to a license or design beforehand bit him in the ass several times.
kefka 12y ago
How peculiar. I just mentioned this project 2 days ago regarding URL shorteners.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836851 Its nice to see a release of something here.
- Famicoman 12y ago
  Funny enough, I've spent the last two weeks researching Nelson and getting my hands on his books to scan high resolution copies of.
smoyer 12y ago
"World wide hypertext - The Web got that niche" Thats's a pretty big niche ... But it pales in comparison to the number of Xanadocs I've been reading lately. On another note, Ted Nelson is one of the characters in The Autodesk Files.
afternooner 12y ago
Why can I not do this with my git commits? If you're trying to track down a blame on a security bug, this would be an amazing way to expose that.
DougWebb 12y ago
I was all prepared to see something exciting when I clicked on the link, since unlike many of the commenters here I know what Project Xanadu is. So I open the page on my smartphone, scroll down a bit, and: "INSTRUCTIONS: DON'T TOUCH THE MOUSE!" Ummm... touchscreen device here? As visionary as Ted is, has he failed to forsee touchscreens and design touch-based interactions? Don't get me wrong, I love my keyboard, but I don't always have one anymore.
- TuringTest 12y ago
  Just keep reading: mouse interactions are considered "advanced" (which may be a good thing - it means you can do keyboard-only basic navigation): ADVANCED DIRECTIONS (mouse OK now) - scrollwheel: go up and down in xanadoc or sourcedoc - clicking on any page takes you to it - spacebar + shift: step through three views
  - DougWebb 12y ago
    On a touchscreen-only device, there is no scrollwheel, spacebar, or shift key. That leaves "clicking on any page takes you to it", which I have with the web already. Except with the web I can also pan and zoom to navigate around the page when I get there.
mcmire 12y ago
Anyone else get a JavaScript error when they attempt to load the demo?
- mcmire 12y ago
  Only runs on Firefox, it seems.
  - dinkumthinkum 12y ago
    It runs in chrome for me.
jayvanguard 12y ago
That's it?!? All these years and now there is incontrovertible evidence there was no substance behind the idea.
a2800276 12y ago
Hmmm, 1997 called and wanted their stylesheet back and they actually gave it back?
leoh 12y ago
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.7 [en-gb] (WinNT; U) [Netscape]">
ulisesrmzroche 12y ago
This says not to use the mouse but it seems to works the same with it. Am I missing something? I actually like it though, it's kinda fun.
- omaranto 12y ago
  It only says not to use the mouse at the top. Further down the page you can find the "advanced directions", for people "advanced" enough to use a mouse. (I'm a basic keyboarder myself.)
jacquesm 12y ago
Would it be possible to re-cast all of the wikipedia content into a xanadoc? It's the closest we have to a huge body of text with full history attached on a wide variety of subjects and two-way links internally. That way you can side-step the problem of doing this for the whole web in one go. It's a pity they haven't open-sourced it, in my opinion the only thing that will ever rescue project Xanadu is if it gets a lot more people working on it. In some parallel universe there is another version of me writing this on a Hurd powered computer using Xanaweb about Tim Berners-Lee's pet project and musing about what it would be like if Linux had succeeded. Edit: I see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849533 had that one first by a considerable margin.
- kristopolous 12y ago
  possible? yes. easy? hah. lol. There's some fundamental differences here which would require a bit of work.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I don't think I used the word 'easy'. I realize that's a lot of work.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Would it be possible to re-cast all of the wikipedia content into a xanadoc? Currently, no, because Wikipedia is multimedia and Xanadu, while it has aspirations in that direction, can only handle text (and, it seems, only linear, unstructured text, and that limitation against structure seems fundamental and deliberate, unlike the absence of multimedia support.)
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    The least they could do is grab a handful of entries and xanadoc it up. Right now it's completely unrelatable to me. Further it's all religious ramblings that I care nothing about.
- 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cell303 12y ago
This reminds me of Kenneth Goldsmith's notion of "Uncreative Writing" (In a nutshell: There is enough text out there, don't write anything yourself) From the looks of it, this would be a nice visualisation and way to trace that kind of writing.
dscrd 12y ago
I'm saddened to know that this genius will go to his grave thinking that he failed somehow.
- RankingMember 12y ago
  Everyone dies having failed at many things in many ways. I don't see what's sad about that.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    Heck, if you don't have a stack of failures when you exit this place, then you really didn't try a whole lot.
  - dscrd 12y ago
    Because I don't think he failed at all. He just thinks he has.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
A very long time ago, I got the Xanadu design document from Ted Nelson. Interesting stuff. I regret discarding it when we moved to a small house in the mountains 15 years ago. I wish I still had it. I like how they admit to having screwed up by not delivering on linked documents before the web.
laichzeit0 12y ago
I tried using it for about 2 minutes and then closed the tab because it was sluggish. It feels sad because I read about Xanadu and Ted's crazy ideas years ago. Unfortunately that's how things work, my first impression of it now is that it's crap.
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
This is interesting because its your classic ivory tower (Xanadu) vs the trenches (web) approach. After all these years and all this spilled ink, we finally have an implementation. Ignoring the tinhat style presentation, its um... interesting I guess, but from what I can tell tries to solve a problem that either doesn't need solving or has been solved in a different way by the web and sites like rap genius. Sometimes a "worse" system that's modular can be built upon is better than a "perfect" system that takes decades to launch and is monolithic and inflexible. Also, this system being blind to things like complex formatting, colors, pictures, videos, etc kinda kills it for the modern user. It really does have this sad sheen to it, like some intelligent people worked real hard on something yet they didn't have the social vision to really ask if this works for the everyman or what problem they were solving for others. Its an Asperger's masterpiece of sorts.
normloman 12y ago
So I gather the "visible connections" refers to the lines from the document to the original source. What if I had a document with over 100 sources? Would lines just litter the whole screen? By then, you couldn't tell which line went where. It'd be like untangling messy wires. I appreciate some of the features included with Xanadu, including 2-way links, transclusions, and versioning. But Ted's always tied it to this interface, which seems poor for reading. Couldn't links to the original source be hidden on command, so I can concentrate on what I'm reading, and not the distracting colors and lines? I'm glad we didn't end up with xanadu.
zacinbusiness 12y ago
So is this basically a sort of more-visual copyscape/turn-it-in system where you can see which parts and how much of a document come from other sources? It's interesting from that perspective, but there's far too much visual noise for it to be the primary document structure of the internet. To simultaneously see every related document to what you're currently reading? Seems like there would be a high cognitive load there.

210 points by tagrun 12y ago

audiodude 12y ago

Upvoted for pure hilarious insanity.

Semiapies 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu Though I'm not sure you're wrong.
JetSpiegel 12y ago
The spacebar is our control key. spacebar + up-arrow or down-arrow: NEXT SEGMENT spacebar + left-arrow or right-arrow: - step onto bridge, see sourcedoc and xanadoc side by side This plus the fact that the proof-of-concept of a thing 40 years in the making doesn't work without Javascript is truly insane.

Duhveed 12y ago

w.t.f.?

madsushi 12y ago

This is actually a pretty cool way to do annotated sources. While the explanatory page is a bit eccentric, it looks like some fun tech.

benigeri 12y ago

What is this?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tagrun 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

straws 12y ago

For those uninitiated, this is the Duke Nukem Forever of hypertext: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings. And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was supposed to save the world.

jere 12y ago
The website makes it look like the Time Cube of hypertext. http://www.timecube.com/ http://www.timecube.com/
- jafaku 12y ago
  What's that? I don't get it.
  - percentcer 12y ago
    If you did get it you'd want to see a psychiatrist.
  - nnq 12y ago
    To make it even worse: <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 11">
  - fennecfoxen 12y ago
    Time Cube is a site by Gene Ray, the self-proclaimed "wisest human". For some reason he thinks the way we should be thinking about the day-cycle is to imagine a cube around the earth, with one edge above daybreak, noon, nightfall, and midnight, for "four simultaneous twenty-four hour days". (He uses the term 'corner' instead of edge.) If you don't get why this is a fundamental breakthrough and the only way to look at the world, he will call you "educated stupid" and a dupe in an ongoing conspiracy theory featuring the usual villains of the Western world, especially academia and religion (and Wikipedia, which will have very little of him). For instance, something about the opposites-in-balance philosophy attached to the "time cube" representation is asserted to be fundamentally incompatible with monotheism. Anyway, ranting about this comprises the bulk of his site(s). That and racial-conflict armageddon if you make your way onto later pages. So - a pretty normal crank after a certain point, but in some ways his website it's sort of THE canonical crank website because of its spectacularly rant-y incoherence and awesome web design.

muaddirac 12y ago

It's impressive that it can run in a browser now. When I try in chrome on OSX, the main document fails to load text. Still, with a little more polish, I could see actually using this (a fully annotated, interactive wikipedia would be a neat demo).

fiatjaf 12y ago

"Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

EGreg 12y ago

Well, decades later they build this, but the question is, why use it when we have iframes and links among the html elements? And this: STRANGE RESTRICTION-- because of Web security rules (a complex maze), a web page cannot request pages from elsewhere. So we have to package all the contents into this first program. It's called the CORS security model. Maybe someone doesn't want pages to embed their stuff?

captainmuon 12y ago
It is actually a pretty strange restriction, if you look at it from some distance. I remember back then, when "mashups" were all the craze, I spent a weekend writing a website that parsed another site - forgot what it was actually about - and displayed it in a nice way. It worked perfectly offline, but failed online. That was the first time I heard about the same-origin policy. The whole web security model grew organically and unplanned. Pages have access to your state and credentials, but are blocked from accessing other domains - but only under certain circumstances (e.g. loading scripts, or sending information is OK, just not "applying" your credentials). Retrospectively, it would have been much more sensible to allow scripts to access arbitrary HTTP (or even socket) addresses, but without sending cookies and credentials along when doing so. There is just so much awesome stuff you can't build now because of that. Server-less RSS readers, a Wikipedia "shell", legally or politically sensitive mashups/JS apps hosted on some anonymous freehoster, and so on.
- chillingeffect 12y ago
  ugh, I hear ya! I, too, built a handful of wildly-powerful active pages... I was inspired by the decks from Neuromancer... I was able to scrape pages, combine multiple pages, but it all fell apart when I ran into xss... It could still be done via proxy...
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Tel Aviv startup http://tomodo.com http://tomodo.com runs a proxy that hosts mashup "mods", e.g. a mashup that injects price history into Amazon pages http://www.amazon-camelizer.tomodo.me/Kindle-Fire-HDX-Display-Wi-Fi/dp/B00CUTT4HY/ http://www.amazon-camelizer.tomodo.me/Kindle-Fire-HDX-Displa... Some discussion here, apparently only the cross-domain traffic goes via the proxy https://github.com/TOMODOcom/TOMODOkorz/issues/3 https://github.com/TOMODOcom/TOMODOkorz/issues/3

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

Oh wow, and just as I was rereading the (in)famous "Curse of Xanadu" article: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html EDIT: Wait, is there anything new here? Hasn't OpenXanadu been around for a while?

sergiotapia 12y ago

I have absolutely no idea what this is, and the wikipedia link below doesn't help. What is this supposed to be/do? I just see an image loading.

keeperofdakeys 12y ago

Xanadu in concept is crazy, a system of documents that aren't just linked via hyperlinks, but where the actual content was linked between different documents. Unfortunately, after many, many times to develop it, it fell on the way-side. It makes this news quite interesting. I strongly recommend people to read this wired article about it http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html. Also some responses to the article. one from someone from Project Xanadu http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html.

jpatokal 12y ago
...except that this release doesn't actually support links, which makes it a bit pointless. Maybe in another 40 years... - links, connections and relations (XANALINKS-- NOT YET) - shared content between xanadocs (MUTUAL TRANSCLUSION, NOT YET)
_delirium 12y ago
Some form of transclusion is used in a reasonable number of hypertext systems, including Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion

hrttrht 12y ago

It's clearly another site by the time cube guy.

GuiA 12y ago

To the confused HNers: Xanadu is a project by Ted Nelson. Ted Nelson is a fundamental figure of early computing (despite not being a computer scientist himself). His work (recommended: Dream Machines/Computer Lib, 1974; Literary Machines, 1981; Geeks Bearing Gifts, 2008) is about how computers touch us as humans, and how they affect our future, especially when it comes to communicating and using them to spread+build knowledge and ideas. When Nelson wrote his first essays, very few people had the insight or knowledge to really understand what he was going on about. Nelson came from a movie acting/storywriting/literary background, and this allowed him to establish parallels and formulate ideas that no one at the time could have done. I would argue that even today, some of his finer points still hold deep relevance and are yet unknown from the general computing crowd. Ted Nelson remains a fairly unknown figure in computing, partly because he never wrote much code/developed products/worked in traditional research groups himself (a major misstep in a field where you tend to be mostly recognized for the projects you ship or papers you publish), and because a lot of his ideas were replaced by ideas that are much more simple to implement and make viable. A lot of hackers do like to ridicule him for those reasons, which I think is a mistake - despite those shortcomings, his body of work is still full of ideas and theories that you won't find anywhere else. You can almost see a second, parallel path that computing could have taken in the 70s. (Nelson was respected by many more famous computer scientists, including for example Alan Kay) That's where Xanadu comes in: Xanadu is an implementation for Nelson's vision for hypertext (which predates the hypertext we know by more than a decade or so). His hypertext is much deeper than Berners-Lee's: notably, it is based on 2-way links (so not only can a page link to other pages, but you can also see which pages link to that page), a deep version system (so that you can access past versions of webpages), stronger "linking" (no such thing as "broken links" in Xanadu), etc. Of course one can see why this is much harder to implement at scale than the web we have now. Nonetheless, Nelson has been working on it through the years, as evidenced by this release. PS: if you do start searching the web for material about Ted Nelson, do not start with the Wired article about him from a decade or so ago. It is terrible. I quite like his YouTube videos, but they require to be familiar with his work (or at least his rhetoric style) already. I think "Geeks Bearing Gifts" is the best foray into Nelson's style - and it is short enough that one can read it quickly. Then, if you want to really get into the meat of his stuff, dive into his other books.

12y ago

mike415 12y ago

Next RapGenius

captainmuon 12y ago
Actually, RapGenius is the realized, "worse is better" version of Xanadu. It takes the simple idea of annotated hypertext and runs with it, and doesn't bother with all this unusual things like panning, backlinks, excerpts, and so on. That's why RapGenius is successful, and Xanadu is still vaporware. OTOH, I don't think this is even supposed to come out. It's rather a demonstration of some pretty interesting, advanced (and thus also failable) ideas. It reminds me a lot of Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" ideas.

pfraze 12y ago

This is actually a rather neat visualization. If you open the demo and wait (and wait) you'll eventually get a document that's assembled from different texts. Hold down the space bar and press up/down to scroll through it. Each time you scroll, you land on another segment. If it's a segment from the left, press space+left to shift over to it. Likewise, space+right to go to the right. Mouse scroll also works for smaller increments, and you can also click on the parallel documents. Other than the visualization, I'm unsure how much it really accomplishes. The recent submission, the Leo editor [1], follows a similar premise but for a much more interesting result: to generate python code. Leo is also an IDE; this is appears to just be a renderer. 1 http://leoeditor.com/ http://leoeditor.com/

e12e 12y ago
Thanks for the help-text -- and the heads up about leo being (recently) posted here. I remember having a look some 10? years ago, nice to see it's still alive! leo submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843907

philliphaydon 12y ago

I don't understand how to read the website...

sp332 12y ago

Some discussion and several lectures expounding on Nelson's ideas, from earlier this year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639599 or "Ted Nelson's computing paradigms expressed as one-liners" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771992

gfodor 12y ago

behold, the leaky-ist of abstractions

softbuilder 12y ago

I have heard of Ted Nelson and Xanadu over the years. But I really don't understand what I'm looking at. Could someone compare and contrast with a more contemporary effort such as Federated Wiki?

rsl7 12y ago
you're looking at quotations and inclusion being transactional links instead of copy/paste. These links possibly involve micropayments. iirc, for Ted Nelson, this had the side effect of solving the copyright problem (for text, I guess) when viewing a document = following all the links to include quotations and other inclusions = micropayments. Or at least that's what I remember from Literary Machines.

drcode 12y ago

He should have followed the "release early and often" mantra and released a version every decade, and then iterated based on user feedback. Instead, by waiting an entire 40 years, the beta seems to have some obvious usability issues that a more frequent once-per-decade release schedule would have caught early on.

Someone 12y ago
But he did. There was a Windows 95 release in 1998 (http://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html http://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.htm... is the best 'link' I can find to it. If you can find it, you should read the license present inside the installer)
enkiv2 12y ago
There was a release in 1993, a complete open source release of all code developed during the 80s at autodesk in 1999, a release around 2003, a windows demo in 2007, and this latest release. There were some intellectual-property-related delays, mostly related to either unfiled patents (wherein the ideas were under trade secret protection until the patent applications were filed) or due to the difficulty of convincing all developers involved to agree to a release. Having too many developers and not getting them to agree to a license or design beforehand bit him in the ass several times.

kefka 12y ago

How peculiar. I just mentioned this project 2 days ago regarding URL shorteners.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836851 Its nice to see a release of something here.

Famicoman 12y ago
Funny enough, I've spent the last two weeks researching Nelson and getting my hands on his books to scan high resolution copies of.

smoyer 12y ago

"World wide hypertext - The Web got that niche" Thats's a pretty big niche ... But it pales in comparison to the number of Xanadocs I've been reading lately. On another note, Ted Nelson is one of the characters in The Autodesk Files.

afternooner 12y ago

Why can I not do this with my git commits? If you're trying to track down a blame on a security bug, this would be an amazing way to expose that.

DougWebb 12y ago

I was all prepared to see something exciting when I clicked on the link, since unlike many of the commenters here I know what Project Xanadu is. So I open the page on my smartphone, scroll down a bit, and: "INSTRUCTIONS: DON'T TOUCH THE MOUSE!" Ummm... touchscreen device here? As visionary as Ted is, has he failed to forsee touchscreens and design touch-based interactions? Don't get me wrong, I love my keyboard, but I don't always have one anymore.

TuringTest 12y ago
Just keep reading: mouse interactions are considered "advanced" (which may be a good thing - it means you can do keyboard-only basic navigation): ADVANCED DIRECTIONS (mouse OK now) - scrollwheel: go up and down in xanadoc or sourcedoc - clicking on any page takes you to it - spacebar + shift: step through three views
- DougWebb 12y ago
  On a touchscreen-only device, there is no scrollwheel, spacebar, or shift key. That leaves "clicking on any page takes you to it", which I have with the web already. Except with the web I can also pan and zoom to navigate around the page when I get there.

mcmire 12y ago

Anyone else get a JavaScript error when they attempt to load the demo?

mcmire 12y ago
Only runs on Firefox, it seems.
- dinkumthinkum 12y ago
  It runs in chrome for me.

jayvanguard 12y ago

That's it?!? All these years and now there is incontrovertible evidence there was no substance behind the idea.

a2800276 12y ago

Hmmm, 1997 called and wanted their stylesheet back and they actually gave it back?

leoh 12y ago

ulisesrmzroche 12y ago

This says not to use the mouse but it seems to works the same with it. Am I missing something? I actually like it though, it's kinda fun.

omaranto 12y ago
It only says not to use the mouse at the top. Further down the page you can find the "advanced directions", for people "advanced" enough to use a mouse. (I'm a basic keyboarder myself.)

jacquesm 12y ago

Would it be possible to re-cast all of the wikipedia content into a xanadoc? It's the closest we have to a huge body of text with full history attached on a wide variety of subjects and two-way links internally. That way you can side-step the problem of doing this for the whole web in one go. It's a pity they haven't open-sourced it, in my opinion the only thing that will ever rescue project Xanadu is if it gets a lot more people working on it. In some parallel universe there is another version of me writing this on a Hurd powered computer using Xanaweb about Tim Berners-Lee's pet project and musing about what it would be like if Linux had succeeded. Edit: I see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849533 had that one first by a considerable margin.

kristopolous 12y ago
possible? yes. easy? hah. lol. There's some fundamental differences here which would require a bit of work.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I don't think I used the word 'easy'. I realize that's a lot of work.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Would it be possible to re-cast all of the wikipedia content into a xanadoc? Currently, no, because Wikipedia is multimedia and Xanadu, while it has aspirations in that direction, can only handle text (and, it seems, only linear, unstructured text, and that limitation against structure seems fundamental and deliberate, unlike the absence of multimedia support.)
- bitJericho 12y ago
  The least they could do is grab a handful of entries and xanadoc it up. Right now it's completely unrelatable to me. Further it's all religious ramblings that I care nothing about.
12y ago

deleted 12y ago

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cell303 12y ago

This reminds me of Kenneth Goldsmith's notion of "Uncreative Writing" (In a nutshell: There is enough text out there, don't write anything yourself) From the looks of it, this would be a nice visualisation and way to trace that kind of writing.

dscrd 12y ago

I'm saddened to know that this genius will go to his grave thinking that he failed somehow.

RankingMember 12y ago
Everyone dies having failed at many things in many ways. I don't see what's sad about that.
- protomyth 12y ago
  Heck, if you don't have a stack of failures when you exit this place, then you really didn't try a whole lot.
- dscrd 12y ago
  Because I don't think he failed at all. He just thinks he has.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

A very long time ago, I got the Xanadu design document from Ted Nelson. Interesting stuff. I regret discarding it when we moved to a small house in the mountains 15 years ago. I wish I still had it. I like how they admit to having screwed up by not delivering on linked documents before the web.

laichzeit0 12y ago

I tried using it for about 2 minutes and then closed the tab because it was sluggish. It feels sad because I read about Xanadu and Ted's crazy ideas years ago. Unfortunately that's how things work, my first impression of it now is that it's crap.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

This is interesting because its your classic ivory tower (Xanadu) vs the trenches (web) approach. After all these years and all this spilled ink, we finally have an implementation. Ignoring the tinhat style presentation, its um... interesting I guess, but from what I can tell tries to solve a problem that either doesn't need solving or has been solved in a different way by the web and sites like rap genius. Sometimes a "worse" system that's modular can be built upon is better than a "perfect" system that takes decades to launch and is monolithic and inflexible. Also, this system being blind to things like complex formatting, colors, pictures, videos, etc kinda kills it for the modern user. It really does have this sad sheen to it, like some intelligent people worked real hard on something yet they didn't have the social vision to really ask if this works for the everyman or what problem they were solving for others. Its an Asperger's masterpiece of sorts.

normloman 12y ago

So I gather the "visible connections" refers to the lines from the document to the original source. What if I had a document with over 100 sources? Would lines just litter the whole screen? By then, you couldn't tell which line went where. It'd be like untangling messy wires. I appreciate some of the features included with Xanadu, including 2-way links, transclusions, and versioning. But Ted's always tied it to this interface, which seems poor for reading. Couldn't links to the original source be hidden on command, so I can concentrate on what I'm reading, and not the distracting colors and lines? I'm glad we didn't end up with xanadu.

zacinbusiness 12y ago

So is this basically a sort of more-visual copyscape/turn-it-in system where you can see which parts and how much of a document come from other sources? It's interesting from that perspective, but there's far too much visual noise for it to be the primary document structure of the internet. To simultaneously see every related document to what you're currently reading? Seems like there would be a high cognitive load there.