Slashdot Mirror
Indirect Documents At Last
BarryNorton writes "In a world that increasingly takes the WWW, its pages and the other documents we exchange in the electronic world as given - and knights Tim Berners-Lee without an understanding of the pre-WWW background of stateless client/server document architectures (e.g. Gopher) and hypertext (e.g. Xanadu) on which he built - there still beavers away a forgotten figure, Ted Nelson, eager to more fully achieve the original hypertext vision.
In recent communications Nelson says:
'The tekkies have hijacked literature- with the best intentions, of course!-) - but now the humanists have to get it back.
Nearly every form of electronic document- Word, Acrobat, HTML, XML- represents some business or ideological agenda. Many believe Word and Acrobat are out to entrap users; HTML and XML enact a very limited kind of hypertext with great internal complexity. All imitate paper and (internally) hierarchy.
I propose a different document agenda: I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper. In that case they can be far more powerful, with deep and rich new interconnections and properties- able to quote dynamically from other documents and buckle sideways to other documents, such as comments or successive versions; able to present third-party links; and much more.
Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm, where everything can be freely and legally quoted and remixed in any amount without negotiation.'"
To respect Prof. Nelson's licensing, it's necessary that I post the whole text, from which I quoted. I'll do so in a reply to this, in the hope that that means it will fold up as comments come in below. (This version is probably the same as the one online, but just to give proper credit, this text was sent to the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) project, with which I'm partially associated)...
RTFS (read the friendly summary) ? ;)
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
"Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm, where everything can be freely and legally quoted and remixed in any amount without negotiation."
Alas, that is why Ted is doomed to obscurity. He has a decent point and then transitions into some hippiesh b.s. that won't even play well to his core utopian audience.
The form should not dictate the comment. And that point is where the techie utopians fail.
Arrgh... That summary was just waay too abstract for me. :-)
Just give me an implementation of whatever you are thinking of, and I'll try to judge it, OK?
The problem is not a lack of information. The primary reason we can't have a fully transparent, infinitely linked "web" is that our puny human brains are incapable of absorbing and filtering that much information.
Consider the difference between Wikipedia and Everything2. Wikipedia is written by people who are interested in the topic at hand, and as such they link to relevant pages that are of interest to them. On the other hand, Everything2 seems to automatically link each "interesting" word to a seemingly random internal E2 page. The result is a useful and interesting encyclopedia in the former case and a jumbled, irrelevant mass of random information in the latter. Although this is just one case, it is very simple to extrapolate this result with any sort of grander version of E2 (e.g. Semantic Web).
What we need is a better way of presenting information and an easier method of linking sites of interest to the data we generate. What we don't need is some way to make everything a link.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
A few choice quotes from the leader:
"I propose a different document agenda"
There's that word agenda, in the first two sentences of his solution)
"I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper"
Every humanist I know who's objecting to the ways of tekkies (love that spelling) starts off by proposing, "I believe we need new electronic documents". "freed from the traditions" also kinda sounds like someone with, umm, an agenda.
"Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm"
This one was priceless. He's going to build a realm. So he can finally call himself a *real* DM...
I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper.
And I believe that I need 10 million dollars by noon tomorrow. Unfortunately, in both cases, there is a "2. ???" step that needs to be filled in.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
May I suggest Web 2.0! Ah no, that's taken. Lets skip version 2 and go straight to...
Web 3.0!
Baz
Idiot, did you even read it?
The illuminati and masons have been working together/against each other for years to establish this "one world document."
wikipedia, meet Ted. Now I'm sure you guys will get along just fine. Wikipedia just needs an interface that is more like Word, instead of a textarea for everything. Maybe it could branch off of wikipedia and we can call it WikiWord!
Sig: I stole this sig.
Learn HTML, or at least learn to use a wiki, old-timer, and stop whining.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That submission sounds like it was run through Babelfish a few times...
Q: You have said that we have settled for less basically. Because I have been brought up with computers the way they are, I can't see this difference or quite comprehend what you are talking about. What would it mean for me if we had what you're suggesting.
[snipped]long ass answer that doesn't answer the question[/snipped]
Q: You haven't answered my question yet. How would life be different for me if we had?
A: I don't know.
So what's this guy talking about? All I can seem to pin down is he wants links to flow both ways (track-backs? Yeeesh. Haven't blogs taught us that these are horrible?) and he wants open-source document standards. Oh, and there's some talk of a license in this, he (again) doesn't mention any specifics, but the impression I get is his "new system" would have all content licensed under the one partiuclar license (which allows people to do whatever they like with it, from what I understood of his ramblings anyway).
He doesn't say HOW this is going to happen, he doesn't mention any benefits to it. Only that it would be a good thing.
Has he been more coherent and specific elsewhere? Or is he always like this?
... and then the sky will rain puppies and kittens and chocolate gumdrops! And all the children in the entire world will join hands and sing a song of love and harmony!
I don't know what indirect documents are, but will they help submitters write a clear and readable summary? I lost interest trying to comprehend that first paragraph.
Project page? Source code repository? Early-access release? Demo URL?!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
He says:
HTML and XML enact a very limited kind of hypertext with great internal complexity.
Then goes on to say:
I propose a different document agenda: I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper.
So basically, he wants a hypertext format that is less complicated than HTML and it's variants but totally scraps the traits current hypertext formats get from their paper-based forefathers? (Okay, a quadriplegic monkey can write a simple hypertext document in HTML, but that's not my point.) Hypertext is based on paper for a reason: We still use paper. It won't be until we all have those little Star Trek-like pads for reading stuff that a truly not-like-paper hypertext format will make sense. Sure, I can put together a pretty sweet hypertext document in Flash where dynamic linking of useful information takes place in real-time, but just try to print it out -- it'd be useless. On the other hand, the only place I can use my Flash document is on a PC, in a Flash enabled browser -- just as useless.
My point is, it's stupid to spend a bunch of time coming up with cool, new, not-like-paper hypertext formats when there's no practical way of making them as portable and accessible as paper. Show me my Star Trek pad and I'll get behind this guy.
This sig rocks the casbah.
"Freedom from ... hierarchy" == freedom from organization.
The internal structure of (eg)OpenOffice documents is XML (a hierarchy!), and the content is organized with (guess what!) hierarchy. This let me do cool things for our company.
How does this nut suggest referencing another document, when that other document has no hierarchy???
Aiiiieeee! Anarchy reigns!
I propose we all think collectively in a team-oriented manner to break through the paridigm and create a beautiful world that we will all be happy to pass on to our children!
/same as original article
My statement sounds great too.. but it says nothing.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When oh when did XML become "limited kind of hypertext"? XML can be used for anything, yes ANYTHING to describe, well, anything. And although most people associate XML with xhtml (as it is commonly transformed into), it normally is not. A number of payment gateways use XML and SOAP or XML-RPC messaging to transmit data (even some credit card processors use this method), and at work we have an e-mortgage application that uses xml as the data format that is not only sent to Freddie Mac for processing, but also transformed with XSLT to produce a PDF of the actual URLA form.
To call XML "hypertext" is either a lie, a gentlement misinformed, or a self-proclaimed expert who thinks he knows it all.
Unfortunately, Mr. Nelson doesn't seem to favor organization at all except for the nebulous group of humanists dedicated to furthering his concept of "transclusion"... a group which apparently only has one memeber; himself.
His idea that everything should always remain linked to its original context is impossible to implement. Whose responsibility would it be to maintain the space and accessibility of those originals? Would I have to store and serve a copy of everything quoted by my work, and everything quoted by each of those, and so forth ad infinatum? Who would enforce this?
In short, these "ideas" are garbage dreamed up by a disorganized mind.
Some one needs to cut down on the coffee.
This idea (now called "transclusion") is the center of our work and the center of my own beliefs.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something isn't "vaporware" till you've promised it- a mistake I don't intend to make again.)
Another example of "agenda"...is it me or does the whole work ring of some sort of ideological agenda? Maybe it's just the writing style the man uses, but it reminds me of some lofty, ideological-agenda-pushing writing. He even says that all publishing is vanity publishing. Does he include his own works in this umbrella statement?
The World Wide Web- Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by the lads in Illinois- has validated all our early predictions for the benefits and wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where anyone can publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost. ("Most people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich to me in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL publishing is vanity publishing.)
I'm not sure what to make of all it.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
The "2. ???" that he really needs to fill in is how to answer the big dogs when they say, "What's in it for me?" Given that he effectively wants to destroy all known document interchange formats (getting rid of Word and Adobe basically represents all documents), he will need a good answer. Companies don't do anything unless they believe it will increase their bottom line. He will need to show them how going this route will do just that. If he can't, then his idea will likely be doomed to obscurity.
kinda sounds like someone with, umm, an agenda.
Agendas are not inherently bad, ya know.
His is an agenda of freedom, the agendas he decries are those of user-locking.
You can't take the sky from me...
Before we understate the achievement of those that created the web, let's not forget that these hypertext people initially didn't get it. Tim berners-Lee wen to a hypertext conference while he was thinking about the web, and talked about the idea of putting it all on the internet... the hypertext guys didn't think it was an interesting idea :-)
"In a world that ... knights Tim Berners-Lee without an understanding of the pre-WWW background of stateless client/server document architectures ... on which he built..."
The world didn't knight Tim Berners-Lee, the British Government did, presumably because he's a British Citizen who has made a distinguished contribution to technology and society. We will probably never know whether a deeper understanding of the pre-WWW background of stateless client/server document architecture on the part of Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair would have had any impact on this decision.
I see the publishing industry loving this about as much as the RIAA loved the original Napster.
Ted Nelson spreads his message of Project Xanadu.
Mentifex spreads his message of Open-Source Artificial Intelligence.
Oh, my! Someone has the vapors!
Do people back away slowly and nervously when he talks like this?
"I've got two words for you, COME ON!"
"COME ON!"
Peter Griffen
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.htm l?topic=&topic_set=
More than you ever need to know about Ted Nelson and Xanadu
Guess everybody is too busy kissing the status-quo's ass to consider that things might change? What, something that's only been around for 30 years is all of a sudden hewwed in stone? Well, surprise, the technology you're married to now WILL crumble to dust eventually, as will your own dear bones, be it in a decade, a century, or a millenium. And other things WILL replace it. Be it by a new twist on an old scheme dreamed up out of some codger's half-gone imagination, or the fresh, new idea of young blood. Momento mori....
Stoner1: And what if, like, our whole universe is just one atom in the fingernail of a giant?
Stoner2:Whoa! Dude!
I'd like to have some of what he's been smoking. I think he's a founding member of PoMo First!
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
we can build a new copyright realm, where everything can be freely and legally quoted and remixed in any amount without negotiation
Anyone else think these guys are going to get thier asses handed to them?
Technoli
Why would a new document structure lead to a new copyright realm? The same idea that allowed Shakespeare's contemporaries to have monopolies on the printing of his plays is the one governing the copying of XML documents today. Changing the 'structure' doesn't free you to remix without 'negotiation'. And anyway, if you can do this freely, how is it a new 'copyright realm' as opposed to simply dumping copyright?
And I can see genuine value of some of the things you're pushing for. Some of this is happening in XML - Syncato does transclusion and I'm working on something similar that does two-way links as well. It's neat to actually see the results and the code, and where it would be useful.
But that's exactly the problem. Is Xanadu the original vapourware?When you try to persuade other people of your ideas, you normally try to explain what's so great and keep your personal problems, rants and unhappyness to yourself. I can tell you why Xanadu won't take off: Mr. Nelson isn't humble enough. "Oh yes, I invented this and that".
I read all of this, and I still don't get it. If you can't explain you ideas in that huge amount of words, maybe your concept is too complicated and nobody wants it? Maybe simplicity won for a reason?
Just a few ideas.
Will the future be one in which the pride of a technologically advanced information society overrides the welfare of its participants? The more we make our documents dynamic, transparent, and interlinking, the more we open ourselves up to the possibility that those we link and those who link to us might wish to do us harm. The bearded terminal hackers of the early days of the web discovered this, "pranking" each other by waiting for a number of links to a particular site to appear, before switching it out to some other, more humorous content. In more serious cases (see Citrix), we can see how this can cause serious public image problems for businesses. As always in networked technology, and predicted by the late Sir Tim Berners Lee, actually, the pornography industry has made an art of this sort of deception. How then, would opportunists exploit these new ideas and techniques? Certainly we can't stop innovation over a fear of how it can be misused, but it should give some of you a pause for thought.
The world has been waiting for a realization of Ted Nelson's hypertext vision for quite some time.
Much as I enjoy reading science fiction, I'm not really prepared to spend much attention to dead-tree descriptions of his vision, or screen replicas of the same.
When I can do some hands-on playing with a non-toy implementation of Nelsonian hypertext, I'll be interested in trying it out and making a judgement.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
So if some sites are quoting dynamically from other sites, what happens when some script kiddies or crackers get into someone's source material?
"... which brings up a good point that Steve Ballmer said in an interview with smallcomputersite.com when he said, 'Fr33 V14GR4!!1!!1 C1AL15 4 L3S5!111!!'"
His is an agenda of freedom, the agendas he decries are those of user-locking.
A freedom that forces anyone that uses his (at the moment thankfully theoretical) document format to license their content under a particular license.
Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather the being locked into OpenOffice, which lets me apply any license I want to OpenOffice documents.
Summarizing and quoting from an article such as this one is fair use. You do NOT have to post the entire thing to satisfy his "license." The only reason you would have to do this is if you wanted to redistribute the piece; i.e., reprint it. . . and summary and quotation are protected forms of fair use, not just for freely licensed material, but any copyrighted text as well.
I'm appalled that, in 2005, we still have to jump through hoops to include arbitrary objects in arbitrary documents. Why can't HTML include a tag, with an "HREF" argument, that points at any object at any URL? Like a text object that is maintained by the server, not necessarily the one maintaining the document in which the document is embedded. To do so now, I have to use IFRAMEs, which have all kinds of quirks and cross-platform differences. How about email, where the Content-Disposition MIME header has, since at latest 1997, let us include a message body from an arbitrary URL, rather than always including every (often huge) object inline, such as "attachments"?
While we're at it, I'd like servers to keep a "reference count" of objects they serve, so documents which refer to their objects can (optionally) register. I'd like servers to keep a database of all their referrable objects and their URLs, so an object whose URL changes (moved internally, externally or deleted) can simply return the response code so indicating. Servers like the "Internet Archive" could be much more useful if they accepted archives of low- or old- refcount objects from elsewhere. Other servers wouldn't be able to "disappear" objects without notice, which is extremely important now that publishers often deny some publications that have such an important effect on politics and business, revising them without notice to coverup various deceptions without accountability.
Many of the problems with making and using Internet documents in WWW and email are solved directly with those two "embedded reference" technologies. This Internet is starting to get old, without outgrowing some of its basic limitation. I want to quote any object (or fragment) from any document in any other, without copying it - just include a reference. We don't need to make a quantum leap to Nelson's Xanadu just to get some things right. Where are the versions of Evolution or Firefox that just use these simple technologies to do that?
--
make install -not war
I've met and talked with Ted Nelson a few times, and I would never presume to speak for him or explain his ideas for him, but I think I can give a little perspective that might help clear up Ted's "thing".
Ted Nelson is personally an incredibly scattered individual, and his whole thought process seems to be like a million mixed-media post-it notes flying around in a tornado through space and time. That is basically why he makes no sense to people (and vice-versa I'd guess). I truly believe that his driving motivation is to create a system of information that WORKS LIKE HE DOES. I don't in any way mean that to be insulting, it is pretty amazing really and I am strongly PRO Ted Nelson. But with that in mind, he needs everything to connect to everything in every single way and be visible from every different angle. In his brain, he doesn't have to leave one program and export his thoughts to another program, and negotiate the copyrights so that he can think properly. And he KNOWS that it's possible, but not too many people are really looking at the big picture. I don't think he's saying there's anything WRONG with the internet, he's just looking about 50 years into the future and wants to get there... sooner.
Remember, this is a guy who thought up hypertext and micro payments at a time when people were literally telling him he was insane. In the next thirty years they went from saying "that could never physically happen" to "even though it's probably technically possible people won't want that to happen" to "oh, yeah, that's obvious and totally unavoidable. Duh Ted. Why are you even talking to me about this ?". So the guy is a visionary and a long term thinker.
Though I do admit that sometimes it seems (like all visionaries) he doesn't seem to have enough respect for the people who are actually creating useful and IMPLEMENTABLE technology. Still, we've been exploring this stuff for 20+ years now, and major "conceptual" advances are just going so unbearably slowly.
So maybe that adds some perspective. It's just my opinion anyway...
...is that they're doomed to not remember that Ted is rehashing Xanadu here. What is being described here is his original conception for Xanadu, with one of his big goals of being able to freely draw from the work of others while allowing them to be compensated. Ted has tried to implement Xanadu multiple times before, burning through alot of money to no clear result. And as noted above by another wise soul, pretty pictures and nice ideas are not what makes the Net -- the Net is still "show me" space, favoring working code over design utopias.
Some of the ideas that Ted has expressed in Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines have been implemented in other places, examples being Notes, NoteCards, and HTML. The fact that his vision hasn't been achieved in full certainly doesn't require that no one else truly understands, nor that we're just one technical push from getting there -- it may just not be fully workable. It seems more likely that the rather grotty little copyright scheme that we live with is something that enough people want as is. It may also be that people don't really want to replace paper with pads, no matter how cool they looked on Star Trek. Not saying that either of these is true, just that consumer acceptance is the metric, whether the consumers are Red-State Republicans or Modern Day Hippies.
His book "Literary Machines" goes into great detail about how this could all be accomplished, and the Xanadu source code (released open source as Udanax) apparently has a partial implementation.
His other book "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" is more the political manifesto and historical document. That one's easier to get, it was published by Microsoft Press.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Now if someone would take that paragraph and make it happen to usenet, we'd be set. Google has destroyed the archives with a politically/patronage-motivated archive presentation decision, noobs have destroyed the medium itself, and http/php forums have left most of the useful discussion on the planet utterly inaccessibly to central indexing. In other words, what WAS good has been destroyed, and what has come out of this confusing matrix can't be indexed in any helpful way (and there's no one to do it; witness Google's disastrous attempt to index all the php forums a while back). A hyper-usenet that doesn't depend on internal quoting, something that indexes and links every bloomin' character in a post or document. Nothing short of that.
Aside from it being a vague idea (not withstanding his spirited defense of his name against his detractors) - he gives me nothing to illustrate how his 'documenation agenda' would be any better than what we currently have. Additionally, he is greatly ignorant of the realities of the systems necessary to make the automated aspects of his idea work - and distressingly it sounds alot like Microsoft's Palladium DRM.
I am all for a simplified documentation system that allows you to keep metadata regarding a document. XML and standards derived from it (Docbook, OpenDocument) fit the bill - and are about as uncomplicated as you can get while retaining that capability. The only thing simpler would be plain text. Of course you would lose any hyperlinking and metadata capability with that.
With XML we have the ability to extend the capabilities of our documents to imbed information - that is extensible for future improvements - and future proof because it is encoded in plain text.
Whatever we want to layer ontop of this is fine - and allows any expression you can think of.
The only part of that he mentioned that makes any sense at all was when he mentioned version control. We already have the tools for that - Subversion or CVS can be integrated in our documentation systems to handle real version control in XML documents.
The paper was not well thought out or delivered - particularly his reference to 'humanists good', 'technologists bad' -- what was that all about?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
That is the way of history, which Marx's teleological view got completely wrong: the young idealists rise up against the complacent, corrupt establishment. If they don't die on the barricades, they succeed by dint of life expectancy if nothing else. But while they are busy outliving their opponents, they aquire things they don't want to lose: status, position, wealth, the logical endpoint of which is cooption. Soon they provide the next generation of establishment, with slightly different decoration perhaps.
I look around and see the movement for free software and free information, and can only predict that while parts of these programs are likely to succeed, the successful parts will be coopted, if history is any guide. Figures, such as Nelson, who retain their youthful energy and idealism, do at least in part becuase the parts of their program dearest to them failed. For this reason they tend to be a bit of a joke with their contemporaries, who see them as incapable of moving on and accepting what is insted of what should be. But underlying this sense of superiority is more than a little insecurity. Free love or whatever it was we were fighting for don't feel real to us anymore because we've become éminence grises too tired and bloodless to enjoy them. Comfort and stability on the other hand we find to have unanticipated charms.
In short, most young people become what they hate, and when they do they have no business feeling superior to anybody who still feels passion and purpose. Sometimes it isn't, "If we only knew then what we know now," it's the other way around.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
George Bush's is an agenda of freedom, too. ;-)
p.s. Since I'm the first to mention a politician, the conversation will now inevitably devolve towards comparisons w/ Hitler (c.f. Godwin's Law).
Unfortunately -- due to Quirk's exception -- there's not a damn thing I can do to stop you... "WE DIDN'T LISTEN!"
.... but you get the idea.
One of the problems with computer scientists who work on grand theories is that they don't give real world examples I can relate to. They end up using jargon wording and vague terms that are hard to define.
I have no problem with his ideas, but please provide and EXAMPLE!
I think he's missing the boat on what a truly open system of information means economically. More and more people are finally realising that it is in their own selfish best interest, economic or otherwise, to be able to access WAY more data freely than whatever they can come up with individually or be forced to jump through hoops for or pay for. Restrictive licenses are just that, restrictive. If you encourage restriction, it just keeps coming back at you, your available knowledge base gets smaller, and harder to access,so even if there might be "more" out there, it won't do you as much good. Look at the hardware model, the more "How do we do that?" information that becomes available to use for anyone at free or reduced cost, the quicker we are getting more advanced features, at a lesser cost. Would we have as much innovation today if patents were even more restrictive and lasted longer? Would we have as much if specs were harder to access? Suppose the patent model for slapping an ICE on a horse carriage lasted 100 years and the specs were blackbox, no looking the whole time? It's the same with knowledge in general, carry it to ridiculous extrapolative extremes in either direction, think of what the world would look like then. In one direction, you would have universal access and sharing, so you can get on with the real work that humans do. The transition period might be painful to some, as not all people could immediately benefit from the openness, as they don't really innovate, they just leech and consume. On the other, carried to the extreme, you would need a personal lawyer on a tether to follow you around and give you guidance on everything you touched or read, combined with your personal accountant clicking away as you paid off your increasingly complex contractural obligations to access this or that.
I know which direction I would prefer...both have ups and downs, but if you have a long range view, to me anyway, it appears free and open would eventually win if expanding the universal knowledge base is a goal.
It would eliminate a lot of middlemen jobs though...
It's funny -- just as this /. story came up in my newsreader, I was reading through the Text Encoding Initiative's introduction to TEI, trying to learn about it for implementation in the Virginia Quarterly Review's archives.
TEI is rather an old standard, as I understand it, that serves as an markup standard for the sort of documents that you might find in a library -- books, articles, letters, etc. Rather than using full-on SGML, or an invented XML standard, TEI exists for marking up documents and describing how its different parts relate to each other and how different documents relate to one another. It's delightfully simple, and very much like HTML, only richer. I gather it's the primary standard for such things.
Those who wish to find out more can visit the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium's website.
-Waldo Jaquith
In a world that increasingly takes the WWW, its pages and the other documents we exchange in the electronic world as given - and knights Tim Berners-Lee without an understanding of the pre-WWW background of stateless client/server document architectures (e.g. Gopher) and hypertext (e.g. Xanadu) on which he built - there still beavers away a forgotten figure, Ted Nelson, eager to more fully achieve the original hypertext vision.
That's one really long sentence, including a parenthetical example inside of a dashed aside. Maybe it would have been clearer to the editors if you'd taken this one sentence and broken it up into three or four.
And it might have been even clearer to skip the entire introductory clause "In a world..." and gotten to the gist: "Hey, Ted Nelson's not dead! You know, the Xanadu guy."
Greets!
OK, up front, I work with Ted, I know him personally, I admire him a lot, so feel free to ignore this post if you want to continue your bigoted, uninformed opinions instead of learning something.
First up, Ted is NOT an uninformed old man - he is the reason, along with Bush and Englebart, that you are all sitting in front of interconnected computers.
Author of two of the most influential books of the computer age, Literary Machines and Computer Lib/Dream Machines (not available in print - I have a copy or two if people are interested), creator of Xanadu WHICH IS AVAILABLE as the Udanax project [site down - Google cache] in both Gold and Green versions.
Victim of a Wired hatchet job - see his reply here
You'll have to take his word for it, but he's pretty sure when asked how his ideas could be simplified, he answered "you could make links one way and use a back button". Familiar?
Everyone that talks about transclusion or linking is refering back to Ted's work.
So show some respect, inform yoursleves and then perhaps, just for once, an informed debate can occur on slashdot!
The problem with the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat!
http://www.minix3.org/index.html seems to be down :( I think a message like "407" or "403.5 - Page slashdotted" would be better.
I think therefore I am... a Linux geek.
I first ran into some of Ted's groupies at a science fiction convention in 1983...you can't fault the man for giving up on his vision.
But the idea that any media technology would somehow elevate the quality or the level of trust or remove/refine the effects that authorship and ownership have on documents when the power of any document is measured mostly in how many can access it...this flies in the face of human nature. People will ask "whose side is this document on?" of most documents with any information more contorversial than a bus schedule. Most documents that take any money or time to put before the public will go on line in spite of the required effort because the document is to someone's advantage. We can keep redefining what "document" means by changing the technology but we can't we can't change what effects the authors of documents want to achieve.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Thanks for the insight into Ted's way of doing things. That makes a lot of sense. So much of what we do is governed by our own peculiar ways of sifting the information we receive. For example, some posters have said that you can't do anything without heirarchy. Perhaps the experience of growing up working with computers makes most of us think that way, or maybe it's something hard-wired into most people at birth. The few people who do think in a radically nonlinear way tend to be either totally nuts or utterly brilliant, or a hybrid of the two.
If you're thinking that long and hard about how the world *should* be, as opposed to how it is, in a sense you're already living in something of a fantasy. The question is really whether you can do something to make your reality everyone else's reality. Hopefully Ted will have many more years to keep pushing for his vision. I don't necessarily think he's got a chance, or even that his vision is The One True Way, but it bothers me when people, particularly in Slashdot, kick a guy for being different.
Maybe we have fallen into the trap of only rewarding those original thinkers who have become famous, rich, or both.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Google for Udanax.
I guess the submitter had the (clearly incorrect) belief that Slashdot readers would be familiar with the work of the guy who actually invented hypertext.
It's sad to see the procession of ignorant comments along the lines of "He doesn't know what he's talking about", "It can't possibly work", "What does he mean by XML being limited", and so on. Those making the comments should go do some basic research. Yes, some of his stuff is hard to understand. That's not because it's bullshit, it's because it is so different from what we have now. That doesn't mean it's impractical. For example, even if we never see Xanadu, I'll be grateful to Ted for the invention of Tumbler Lines, which I've used myself for data encoding. (The telephone system ought to use tumbler lines, for example.)
It's even sadder that the Xanadu project basically died because of a classic combination of technology-led development and bad project management. A lot of the technology was real; "Literary Machines" describes a big chunk of it. There are days when I still fantasize about being independently wealthy and spending my time actually implementing it cleanly, or at least building a Mac OS X ZigZag.
I do think there's one flaw with Xanadu: as the reluctance of the world to embrace CSS and the changes to copyright law have shown, most people don't want a world where information can be used and reused, even if they get paid for each use. Instead, they want a world where they can specify in exact detail what a page should look like, can control who can link to them, can decide whether you're even allowed fair use quotations. If Xanadu did exist now, it wouldn't kill the web--the web would continue as the venue for information control freaks. So in a sense, the revolution Ted really wanted can never happen now.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I refer you to this particular link that would have been much worse if the linked data was included inline.
1 5/1823226&tid=126&tid=14
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
No matter what kind of underlying structure you invoke into building a new document structure/exchange format/whatever you call it, the old laws of the land will come in and hunt it, as soon as here is any money to be made in it. Just think about DMCA, which was brought in by the Congress after the big business lobbied for it..
Berners-Lee weeded out the reasonable subset of Nelson's visions and fortunately knew how to properly implement them - creating a client-server architecture, using open standards like SGML and TCP/IP, designing a well-engineering network protocol, and writing usable reference implementations of server and client.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
nt
Need one say more?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics
What about Annotea, Xlink, XPath?
And XULrunner with SVG maybe, to escape the rectangle
XBL to do some really powerful binding
Seems to me all needed ingredients are either there or very soon will be
The idea of an electronically connected web of hyper-linked documents for academic review was dicussed by Kevin Drexler in the Engines of Creation (a really good book about NanoTech published almost 20 years ago.) I'm not suggesting that it was his idea, in fact I suggest we accept the concept of "independent origination", i.e. that multiple people can have the same idea independent of each other. In order to promote "independent origination" among all the people, let's listen before we judge, and postpone judgement until required by other forces.
Software freedom...I love it!
The point I'd like to make is no matter how interesting and revolutionary a technology is, it does no good to anyone if people don't actually USE it.
At the time, the file/folder analogy in computers was a good technology. It was something people already understood and could easily pick up and work with. The whole reason people didn't use computers up to that point was because they didn't want to learn "cryptic" commands. Not that the command line was unusable in general- it was just unusable for most people. The selling point for the original macintosh was that it worked just like how you already worked, except non-destructively and with better ability to manipulate objects (then doing it by hand). It allowed you to do what you already do, but more powerfully. That point was the glue which allowed the personal computer to work in the minds of people.
But I think it's clear to almost everyone that the computer and the web have evolved to the point where they need a fundamental re-design if they are to progress any further. The realization of this has happened gradually over time, dispite the technology, as people have become more creative and discovered that they want more out of what is available. For this, I will point to how computing has moved towards wireless, handheld devices - devices which are not locked down in physical space and support the user during everyday life. For software, I will cite the fact that people have taken HTML and created amazingly complicated ways of manipulating it's structure so they they can put content where they want it to be and have it dynamically update. Wikis are a hyperlinking format which allows microcontent relationships to form. And finally blogs, the firefox extension Greasemonkey, and rss aggregators have all developed the means to pull content in from multiple websites into a single location.
And so my belief is that if we were to create a new form of the web that resembles this xanadu system, the time is now ripe to do so. People are much more accepting today of non-linear, dynamic documents and structures then they were when computers were first created. So the likelyhood for success of a new technology that takes those ideas and creates a more intuitive way of working with them I think is pretty high.
As a coincidence, Cringely just posted the latest episode of NerdTV (torrent file: http://pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/mp4-torrent/redir/h ttp://distribution.nerdtv.net/video/ntv007/ntv007. mp4.torrent)
where he interviews Dan Drake, co-founder of Autodesk. AD bought Nelson's company and tried to get Xanadu to work, but as Drake puts it, it was 3 orders of magnitude from completion. Interesting interview.
"I honestly would vote libertarian if their candidates weren't usually total cooks."--slashdot poster
Wow,
News for nerds, stuff that matters. Hah! You guys are so stuck, heads down looking at the unholy mess that is the web and the way we work with data today. Open your eyes, goddamit, raise your vision a little.
Document structures are not hierarchical - anyone who thinks they are has swallowed that meme whole. A little honest thought will normally reveal it's untruth. Overlapping tags are essential in any serious system for annotation. I have real problems that require transclusion to solve. But they currently require blue-sky solutions, not because this is particularly difficult, but because our infrastructure doesn't support this method of working with data.
It's rather like if someone a couple of decades ago proposed a system to serve up documents you could interact with from anywhere. You are the people who would pour scorn on the idea, without understanding how it might transform our world. Documents?! Worldwide! Documents on screen don't look as good as when they are printed anyway! NO THANK YOU!
So much for Slashdot being the home of any intelligent discussion on technology or computer science. I think I'll go now, to leave the appropriate amount of space for anti-Microsoft rants, how linux will take over the world any hour/week/year now, and another five articles about how AJAX will transform the web.
Spoken discourse is not hard-wired linear in the brain. It's wired as branching paths. This is easily observable. When you're listening to a sentence, there can be more than one way to expect it to go. There have been scores of experiments that show that brains prepare for and expect each of these multiple paths, only "collapsing" on the one it actually takes once it becomes evident. There tends to also be forgetting of the expectancies pruned by the actual experience, so that in retrospect our foresight appears better -- and more linear -- than it was. Preparing to speak is largely a use of the same brain areas that comprehend the speech of others. Our preparation also interacts with what we expect ourselves to say, and of course with the cloud of expectable reactions by our listeners. What we end up saying is again one path "collapsed" from a cloud of possibilities we had (largely but not entirely unconsciously) before us. That's part of why we often say something different than our best expectancy of what we would have said.
Music works with the same swarm of expectancy. Good music often sets up one set of expectancies as most probable, then takes a less-expected turn to surprise us and challenge us to listen.
Compare quantum physics, where multiple possible paths also finally collapse to one in the instant. The physicist Henry Stapp, in DARPA-funded research, suggests this is more than coincidence: that it demonstrates that consciousness is itself based in quantum processes. Be that as it may, language is only linear in the way that the path you walk is linear -- you only end up taking one path at a time. But in its possibilities -- possibilities which are integral to its use and meaning -- language is a branching-paths structure (just like roads in the real world form), and even critically depends on viewing somewhat parallel paths simultaneously to produce metaphor and analogy. The "linearity" is something of an illusion, presenting itself after the facts of language and thought.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I can't quite pin it, but everytime I read something by Nelson I have this feeling he's on crack or something the like.
More to the point, I never saw a well-presented summary of his ideas, allowing one to evaluate: concepts, possibilities, hurdles, the way there.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
It's a shame that his life-long dream has never come to fruition, but a similar and simpler one has taken over the globe. It must be incredibly frustrating.
The world needs good ideas, but good ideas do nothing by themselves. Imagining something brings it partially into existence in the sense that ideas are the mother of every action, but implmentation and execution are required for any real result.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board made me extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective on how software should be developed- as a branch of cinema and under the visionary supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
I see, he wants to be the "visionary director" and leave the "light-work" of building a robust, scalable, and secure system to the "tekkies". I think it would be a shame if his project were implemented, since it would almost certainly fall short of his vision and dissapoint him terribly. At least it's safe while it's in his head.
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
anyone seen RDF lurking around?
.. hmm dosn;t fill me with great confidence that the "future of the web" can;t survive a slashdotting.. from translocation.net Transliterature Slashdotted! Please come back later or proceed at your own risk! .. and i still have no idea what it means.. all i get is a vison of de_dust but with all the walls replaced with text
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gawd! you people. this is pure and simple Time Cube Markup Language. If you can't understand what it does, you are undoubtedly too stupid to ever use it. just continue on using your "web", luddites.
if it ain't broke, break it.
Deluded narcissist with paranoid tendency or rampant troll; either way this whole article it's semi-literate babble.
that's the best karma whoring i've ever seen. Word.
What if D O G really spelled cat?
Seriously, any one who gets that summary is stoned.
The reason the Web "took over" was because the techies delivered a workable infrastructure that other people found useful. We're still waiting for Xanadu.
Love,
The World
If everything you quote is updated in real time, does yesterday's text get memory-holed?
I'm trying to wade through the excitability in TFA...Nelson seems to describe what I'll call "some wicked-cool Minority Report stuff." His abstract goal sounds like a fusion of copy editing and graphic design...two functions evidently (cf. Geocities) too disparate for one person to manage, even within the boundaries of conventional print or HTML.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
You're way off base - this guy was one of the founders of what we now take for granted as HTML - his ideas are seminal, and we WILL one day have documents with dynamic quotes, multi-way links and all the things he's talking about. That would be a paradigm shift compared to the very poor imitation we have now.
"New paradigm GOOD! Old paradigm BAD! Hulk SMASH old paradigm!"
Is this what you yell out the door of the transport as the stripper/parachutists dive out of the plane? *ducks*
Dog is my co-pilot.
From wikipedia:
His pretentious letter with no content whatsoever is a great example of this character, and of the worthless hypertext literature prior to the web. This was academic waste time at its best. Luckily, a despicable tekky got inspired, did some hard work, and gave us something useful and usable. He changed the history of mankind for ever. Others, like Dr. Nelson, only gave us a headache.
On the other hand:
I'm reminded of all the attempts to make coding simple enough for the masses. VB, Hypercard, etc, all tried new paradigms and they all failed because the real problem is the logical thought process required, not the plumbing to implement it. While I'm fascinated by some of the stuff I could potentially do with this (I'd love to name my blog "Glasperlenspiel" and mean it!), I wonder if it's not an attempt to fix something that isn't broken, in a way that misses the point.
Microsoft just patented a new file format...
I've known Ted for over 20 years and love his idealism. I believe that XRI can provide a seamless transition from the current document web to the future social web (PDF), complete with authenticated transclusion.
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
>When you find the page you're looking for in the encyclopedia or on the web, you stop dealing with indices and hyperlinks, and start reading linearly.
Bad example for your point. When I was a kid encyclopedias were on paper (we had invented fire and stone tools though) and I usually wound up with half a dozen volumes open on the floor around me to track cross-references.
While we're at it, I'd like Microsoft to shut down, Gwyneth Paltrow to divorce in order to marry me, and Delorians to return to production (with Back to the Future fixtures).
CNN isn't going to want MSNBC snatching a paragraph here and there. This just isn't a feasible idea.
I believe the current state of the world is unpleasant and icky, and we should build a fairy utopia in the clouds to live in.
This utopia will be free from strife, discord, and people who don't agree with me. After all, I'm always right. Some people argue that they are right and I am not, but in the end I always agree with myself.
The liberals and communists have hijacked the concept of utopia with things such as "progress" and "dictatorship of the proletariat". We can have utopia NOW if we discard these concepts, which after all do not coincide with common practice. We are hardwired to want things the same, all the time, and have somebody else tell us when and how to do them. It is only natural.
In conclusion, once you all have built this fairy utopia in the clouds, I will ascend to rule it. Until such a time, I'll just bitch about how everyone else sucks.
tekkies (love that spelling)
Are those fans of Tektronix or Shatner's TekWar?
Let me see if I can get this straight.
Nelson is looking for two-way linking between content objects (text,image,audio,video documents, or subsets thereof). So that when I link to (embed a reference to, really) a text fragment in one document, that text fragment will "know" that it has been linked to. So for any given fragment on the screen, you can call up a list of all the other documents that link to it. That shouldn't be too hard. Trackback is a crude version of this, for whole documents rather than fragments. Most wikis will also tell you which other pages link to the current one.
Furthermore, he would like that embedded fragment of text to be dynamically updateable, so that when the original is revised, the change propagates to all of the documents that link to it. I believe this is what he means by "transclusion". That seems *much* more difficult -- how do you recover the correct fragment from a heavily edited document? It also opens a huge can of worms socially -- what if I don't want the quote to be updated? What if the author redacts the original fragment, should it disappear from my document?
I can see where Nelson's vision is worth having, but I can't quite wrap my head around how to implement transclusion in the real world.
I couldn't shake the feeling though, as he spoke to me of his mad schemes and visions from the 1960s that the computer world still hadn't caught up with (and hasn't yet today, either) and that most people couldn't even understand, that I was gazing into the eyes of Babbage. A man cursed to envision things long, long before it's in any way possible to actually build them.
He coins a lot of new words to describe the concepts he's come up with, so he can build bigger ideas out of 'em. My favorite one is "transclusion", which he explained in his speech there.
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
n/t
Daniel Dennett, in his book Consciousness Explained, argues that brain processes are inherently parallel, and that the relatively slow speed of speech/linear thinking compared to the rest of the brain's processes is because after birth we develop a sort of serial "virtual machine" by subvocally autostimulating our language processing center with our speech center. He contends that none of this is actually hardwired into the brain but our enormous mental plasticity causes it to inevitably develop when we are exposed to the speech patterns of other humans (although he does suggest genetic fixing of speech traits via the Baldwin Curve)
The actual way our brain stores and processes information is ontological (in the information theory sense), i.e. a graph. So "Xanalogical"/ontological/web-like information structures are actually closer to what our brain operates on than a linear narrative.
I met Ted Nelson on a few occasions, at the Xanadu offices on California Avenue in Palo Alto, and also on his houseboat in Sausalito. He is a cool guy and a visionary. I can say that his vision has greatly influenced me and countless others. What Ted is *NOT* is someone who can create a product, and furthermore a product that would work for normal people. As someone suggested earlier, Ted is interested in doing stuff that works for himself, not so much for others. So what? That is not his role to be a product designer. That is not where he can contribute to the world. Where he can contribute is by sharing his wacky visions from Planet Ted and influence those who live on Planet Earth and create new tools for normal people, by challenging established notions and making them think.
When trains started coming, they said traveling above 30mph would probably kill a man. (Also recall - bilingual folkses, multitrack thinking at it's finest.)
It takes a bit more
Never driven on a busy highway listening to music and planning your day, notice the traffic and plan a completely different route without missing a beat or forgetting to pick up the wife's dry cleaning?
than a decade of intense schooling
Case in point - my little sister (hands off "sexy rexy"), 3-5 gaim conversations, a couple of browser windows, the telephone, "hey did you do your homework/ left book in the locker" " be ovr 10min" I know you can handle this. --* so how many phone conversations, missed assignments, early mornings and teachers that you've had a crush on ran through your head? I know you didn't think about my sister! *--
to train our minds to think linearly.
Remember?
Took me about 15 minutes to pull all this nonsense together, though so far as my brain was concerned it was written about 2 seconds after I read your comment. Pity that tekkie guy doesn't know any decent visual artists.
nail on head.
-ashot
he's idealizing about independence approaching infinity. we have people who benefit from censorship and hierarchy is then needed to decide what and what not to censor.
hierarchy-less documents mess with the concept of censorship and i like them because i like information free---but most people aren't geniuses like me.
$_.=["a".."z"," "]->[rand 27] while !/just another perl hacker$/;
Why did OpenDoc and P&S die? Because from a programming standpoint, they are horribly complex to implement in an application or OS. Imagine the complexity of dealing with just a fragment of text: when it changes, how should that change be interpreted? If I take out sentences over time and replace them with others, should there be a point where the text is declared (by the publisher, or by the subscriber) to be a different text entirely? If so, how do you do that and under what conditions? If not, why not? As the size of the fragment changes with the content, how do you reliably determine the "start" and "end" of it any more? If the source text is reorganized, do we have to track every chunk of our fragment's text and where it ends up? Do they still get published in something resembling the original order and format, and if so, how do you decide how to do that? If not, what do you publish and in what form?
Also, at the time (early 90s) there was barely enough user understanding of the idea of linking one document to another, let alone actively including a part of a document dynamically. People just didn't know what the hell it was all supposed to be for in an essentially pre-Web world. Almost fifteen years later, "such a thing is obvious", but back then the vast majority of developers said "the hell with that -- it costs more to do than we'll ever get out of it".
Nowadays, doing everything over the Internet would probably reduce the complexity somewhat -- you wouldn't have to have so many different kinds of applications and document types able to talk to each other, so the conversation framework would be correspondingly less complicated. You could also (assuming you can make Internet P&S work in the first place) modify the P&S dynamic to account for copyright, licensing and other conditions on the Publish end, and alerting subscribers to sudden major changes on the client end (to warn users of published info that their commentary on or use of it may now be out of date as a result of a major change).
Much as with some other literary thinkers, I think there's a kernel of a good idea that might be implementable at the core of all this verbiage coming from Ted Nelson, it's just pulling it out of the torrent that's the hard part. And in fact it turns out that a good deal of what he says has actually been done already in some form, as others have pointed out here.
-- Old Man Kensey
Should we then view the GPL as a contract with our bloodless future selves?
My keyboads not woking popely.
In 30 years the guy couldn't just write some code?
Sorry, but he just sounds like a deranged theorist who lost out to people like Berners Lee who could interface with reality a little more pragmatically.
The WWW may be flawed, but it's a killer app of IT and has been handing out value to its users since day one while this Nelson character seems to have done nothing but steam in jealousy.
Disclaimer: I might be totally off base here, I'm just giving my reaction after reading the full Manifesto. And yeah, I've been around long enough to know that hypertext-the-concept was not invented by TBL. But even gopher continues to kick Nelson's ass in terms of user base.
Many believe Word and Acrobat are out to entrap users
How is Acrobat trapping anyone? The Acrobat spec is published and available for free on Adobe's own web site. I'm working on a program for my senior project class that writes Acrobat files directly from a Java program.
I'm going to make a diagram of the proposed relationship between non-linear thinking and hierarchical thinking, made in the writeup:
Wait... the argument that denounces hierarchies and lauds non-linearity is itself hierarchical? Turns out, you can't even make an argument against hierarchies without using a hierarchy. You can make a weaker argument, saying that hierarchies are sometimes useful, sometimes not, but that's not nearly as dramatic.
"It's Dot Com!"
Alice: "They got to Webster!"
If you don't build it, they won't come.
Legally, copyright is already spoken of in terms of a "realm;" there is more to Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your weekend forays into non-television imagination.
I originally read that as TRekkies. I spent the next few lines wondering what he had against Star Trek fans. (maybe he's just against Shatner... that would work either way)
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
In order for the quoted text to "fold up" as the author intended, requires that it be unmoderated or neutral. If you mod it up to 5 it won't fold up at all, which is why he put it under a short description: so people could look at it and decrease their moderation limit should they choose to read this monstrosity.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
While I will admit that there is a time and a place for style markup in e-mail, (I generally don't like it. Give me plain text e-mail, please!) I abhore externally linked e-mail content and disable it whenever I can.
Such external links are what make mail-bugs possible and promote receiving additional spam. (look joe, we got a live one!)
Grrrrr.....
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
Read the guy's stuff: he's almost certainly got a serious mental disorder that can be treated with drugs and won't take them. But IMO it is simpler: he's merely a small, mad, egotistical person who occasionally is dragged up on stage by cruel people so everyone can have a chuckle. Truly sad.
And even after that, one still has to consider the linear nature of writing... You don't interpret writing non-linearly (as you would, say, a painting or sculpture). Even assuming that communication is wholly non-linear, logic (and therefore argument) is a heirarchical process in and of itself... If you remove the heirarchy, all you have is a series of premises. (Even inference involves a heirarchy). And most people (well, at least the /. types) don't want to be told "this is better". They want it justified that "this is better".
In essence, he may be able to form the philosophy in his head, but communicating it in such a manner is damn-near impossible... Wholly due to the semantics (or the lack thereof) involved.
The problem is not the concept, but the implementation.
Without some solution to the problem of conceptual processing, Xanadu cannot be made to work, certainly not on the scale Ted has envisioned since the beginning.
And the experience over twenty years of trying to make it work clearly shows that it cannot work without some fundamental breakthrough in knowledge representation technology.
Now it might be possible to get the Web to allow "links in", as he puts it. AJAX is sort of a baby step to that possibility, perhaps. If your Web browser can run JavaScript to access a server database and update your page without reloading the entire page, I see no reason why it can't send a request to the server to access some sort of Google-index of all links to the page you're looking at, select links on some specified basis, and retrieve and send those links to your browser. The browser would receive only the links, not the entire pages, and could then organize them in some way, and present them to you in some overview form (assuming there are many), and then you could browse around in them, retrieving the pages they link to as desired.
The problem would be organizing them in some rational way - it might not be very well-done without conceptual processing, but something might be done along the lines of what the desktop search tools like Copernic and Google try to do. In other words, the browser might need to be integrated with a desktop search engine in some manner.
Just a (hazy) thought.
Nice to see Ted is still around, though. I listened to him at a West Coast Computer Faire back in the eighties, when he said there was no acceptable software on the market. He was right then, and he's still right about that now.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
What happens if Document A includes Document B, and Document B includes Document A?
You seem to be saying that the reason his arguments appear hierarchal is because they have to be communicated, that its the communication of the philosophy that makes it seem hierarchal, when really its non-linear. This is nonsense. If I have a preference for blue over red, I've created a hierarchy, which is completely different from non-linear awareness of red things and blue things that doesn't privilege one or the other. When I choose blue things instead of red things, I am applying my hierarchy, just as when I choose non-linearity over hierarchy, I am also applying a hierarchy. Pretending that we're not doing that, or simply not bringing it up doesn't make it go away.
"It's Dot Com!"
The way I read the Content-Disposition RFC, it provides semantics for how to display included components of a message. Now, if you wanted I suppose you could do a Content-Disposition: inline of a chunk of HTML that referenced images and objects from a remote website, but that would a) just use the standard HTML semantics b) would be considered a security risk by most mail clients.
-- Old Man Kensey
What an awful sentence! It runs on, digresses, multiple metaphors. I think we don't need to see the other entries, people!
Have you ever thought about the security ramifications of what you're suggesting?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The approach of Ted Nelson isn't to convince, but to entice.
While the WWW has been a tremendous leap for humanity, it is fundementally limited. Nelson's vision of transclusion is based on the structure of thought, not on the physical.
Articles written in this manner are usually without merit, but scattered throughout are indications of well thought out ideas. WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like), which is both obvious and virtually unattainable with the current paradigm, and the seldomn asked "How can electronic documents on the screen IMPROVE on paper?" challenges the status quo.
The first steps toward implementation have been taken. The next steps are not for the visionary to take.
There is no more hierarchy than there is a hierarchy when flipping a coin in the wind. The results can be "placed" in a hierarchy. The brain (and body) is much more likely to work in patterns and relationships of varying and changing strengths than hierarchies.
You should realize that Barry Norton is an expert on these matters. He's the Real Deal.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
But there's nothing inherently oppressive about hierarchies, or any organizing system. They become oppressive and inflexible when they are applied universally for all situations. For example, if we were sorting apples, no-one objects to not eating green, unripe bananas or black, overripe bananas. But if we expressed a similar preference for the color of people's skin, it would be a misapplied hierarchy, and in fact, a false one. But misusing a hierarchy doesn't imply that hierarchies are inherently bad, nor does it imply that non-hierarchal systems are inherently better. In fact, we could just as easily misapply a non-hierarchal system that refuses to acknowledge differences between things to create a different kind of oppression. I say that whether you look at things in a hierarchal way or a non-linear way, you are imposing a perspective. Just as you can place anything into a hierarchal system, you can put it in a non-linear system, and neither one are any more true than the other.
"It's Dot Com!"
As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I was saying. However I am talking about the conversion of his mental model to something most people will understand. Another way to apprach my statement is "A heirarchy is necessary to fit the characteristics and/or restraints of language itself". I demonstrated a different heirarchy (and it was a heirarchy, albeit grouped by topic rather than "temprement"), to attempt to demonstrate that heirarchies are relative to the observer--in other words you may have created a heirarchy to understand what he was saying, or to prove your own point.
You said in your previous post, "You can't even make an argument against hierarchies without using a hierarchy". This is true, because logic is heirarchical by nature, and argument is necessarily built on logic. I was implying that your statement doesn't hold it's water. To make it clear: if his paper didn't form a heirarchy, it would not have been able to express anything in the modern tounge.
Note that I am not talking about liking A better than B. It would seem obvious that people will prefer As over Bs, or what have you. I am talking about a heirarchy of thought, as compared to a jumble of ideas. There are people who think in a jumble of ideas, and who then translate those ideas onto a structure so other people understand it.
How can I make this assumption? Honestly, I don't have the slightest idea what is running through anyone's head. However, I happen to be a non-heriachical thinker. And yes, it does cause problems with my communication. As I write this, I am jumping back and forth as different ideas surface. I get a idea of what I want to establish. Then I place them into the heirarchy where they "fit best". Then I go back and read it, pruning out the stuff I don't need anymore. (Yes, I understand that most people have a process similar to this, but I need to do it every time I write anything longer than 2 sentances).
But when I am speaking, it's a completely different story. Completely and utterly incoherent. I start with 1 idea, jump up 3 "levels" of abstraction, then go back down below the original idea... all within the same sentance. Most of the time I go back and forth noting where errors or "mostly truths" are... I use words in strange contexts, then have to go back and forth to ensure people understand it... I'll just spout something that I know is true and not explain how I know... It's a complete mess. (Luckily, I have some awesome friends who "translate" my ideas to something a bit more applicable and/or understandable).