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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)...
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!
The illuminati and masons have been working together/against each other for years to establish this "one world document."
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?
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.
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.
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
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...
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!
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
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
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....
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
$_.=["a".."z"," "]->[rand 27] while !/just another perl hacker$/;
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.
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!
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.