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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.'"
Sorry, the first sentence is supposed to be the summary. I offered the second part, as a quote, if the editors wanted to reproduce this (as they do for book reviews etc.), but they've chosen to just bang it all together to make one of the longest summaries I've ever seen!
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at hyperland.com/trollout.txt
and xanadu.com/trollout.txt
Permission is given to redistribute this but only in its entirety.
Dear World:
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.
For years, hierarchy simulation and paper simulation have been imposed throughout the computer world and the world of electronic documents.
Falsely portrayed as necessitated by "technology," these are really just the world-view of those who build software. I believe that for representing human documents and thought, which are parallel and
interpenetrating- some like to say "intertwingled"- hierarchy and paper simulation are all wrong.
This note is to announce a very special and very different piece of open-source software you can download and use now, for electronic documents radically different from anything out there- and a bigger plan.
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.
It's time for an alternative to today's document systems, and we the loyal opposition have a proposal.
>>>Humanists please jump to transliterature.org, since what follows will be somewhat technical.
But first, some background. This will take a while.
BEFORE THE WEB, A GREATER DREAM
Long before there was a World Wide Web, there was a project with greater intent. This was Project Xanadu*, a bunch of clever, cynical idealists who believed in a dream of world-wide hypertext- somewhat like the web, but deeper and more powerful and more integrated, rooted in literary ideas, and mindful from the beginning of the copyright problems that would come. The project started unofficially in 1960 when I began to think about world-wide screen publishing, but grew to involve about a hundred participants and supporters over the last half-century.
(Note that I flip between "we" and "I" because this piece culminates work and ideas shared by a number of others over the decades; but I am presently acting alone, so whenever appropriate I am including those others by pronoun.)
Even from the beginning, we planned on unrestricted publishing of hypertext by millions of people; but web-like documents were only the beginning, only one possible form.
The Xanadu project asked at the beginning- not, "How do we imitate paper?", but "What if we could write in midair, without enclosing rectangles? What new ways can thoughts be connected and presented?" Many ideas and screen maneuvers came to mind, but they always sharpened down to this question:
"How can electronic documents on the screen IMPROVE on paper?" And our key answer was: "Keep each quotation connected to its original context."
This idea (now called "transclusion") is the center of our work and the center of my own beliefs. I
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
Links are created on E2 whenever any user moves from one node to another. This happens when node authors consciously link text within their node to another node (called "hardlinking" in E2 lingo) or whenever a reader of the node searches for another term (called "softlinking"). Node authors are actually encouraged to do a bit of softlinking on their own articles after posting to nodes they consider relevant, but any random user can also just decide to surf to a totally random node. This has led to the somewhat destructive process of creating nodes specifically for the purpose of softlinking to nodes that are derogatory.
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
Actually, the <object> element, which the W3C says is for "generic inclusion" has been around for a number of years (since HTML 4.0). I believe it does what you want. From what I understand, the <iframe> element has been deprecated in recent versions of XHTML. My apologies if you are merely being facetious and know this already.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
In the original Xanadu design, every single key stroke went into the permascroll - and documents were pointers to spans in the permascroll. Every version of a document could therefore be summoned by the correction collation of the appropriate spans. It's a lot more complicated than that (enfilades and tumbler maths, etc.), but that's a good approximation of Ted's continuing vision as well - as these spans could also be transcluded to allow documents to be built out of other documents and so on, with no loss of the original context. feel free to ask for more detail.
The problem with the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat!