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.'"
"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.
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 :-)
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?
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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.
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
In re-defining page down to the sentences across which I scan hopping from structure to sructure down what I (very naively, obviously!) call a page, you miss the fact that these things are not individually accessed via HTTP and assembled, the whole thing (let's call it an HTML document, if you want to redefine the semantics of page) is one from the point of view of hyperlinking (save for anchors, which are completely inadequate).
I know you're trying to get me to concede that at some level I need to read word by word, which I have no problem doing, but you're missing the context of this entire discussion...
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!