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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.'"
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)...
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...
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.
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?
"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.
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....
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.
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.
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....
I don't understand how your comment is in response to that text. The key words in it are "legally" and "without negotiation". The copyright idea behind Xanadu was that you aren't really copying, you are just referencing, and displaying the content in-line, so the original author remains in control of the segment your are referencing (and may control access to it, including asessing fees for its use... or not... it's up to the author.)
About the last assertion, the form always shapes so-called "content" (you meant that instead of comment, right?)-- by making some things easy to do and some things difficult. Xanadu very intentionally creates a new ways to construct "content" by making inclusion-by-reference. So when Nelson talks about a "new realm" he's really just talking about what the new technology lets you do that is not as easy to do today. This is not some weird fantasy, its simply a (marketing-oriented) description of what you can do with this kind of technology, which is real and implemented (and has been partially for 30 years, just never used, that's all).
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.
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.
Can Mozilla or Firefox grab text/plain from a URL into an OBJECT tag, and properly render (flow) the surrounding layout?
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make install -not war