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Hypertext Creator: Structure of the Web 'Completely Wrong'
angry tapir writes "The creator of hypertext has criticized the design of the World Wide Web, saying that Tim Berners-Lee's creation is 'completely wrong,' and that Windows, Macintosh and Linux have 'exactly the same' approach to computing. Ted Nelson, founder of first hypertext project, Project Xanadu, went on to say, 'It is a strange, distorted, peculiar and difficult limited system... the browser is built around invisible links — you can see something to click on but you’ve got nowhere else to go.'"
I'll have some of whatever he's been smoking.
The first time I saw hypertext (in lynx), I thought it was, basically, what was to later be realized in Wikipedia: something where most words are hyper-linked and take you to more information about that word.
That's what I thought hypertext was all about. And really, isn't Wikipedi pretty awesome, in form, if not always in content?
“[My approach] would be entirely different from today's documents where you look at one page at a time and you can see a ribbon or beam connecting documents together,” he said. “Having to refer to a paragraph and a sentence in an e-mail is just so barbaric when you could just strike it out and make the connection between sentences.”
Is it just me, or is this just completely incoherent? What the hell is he talking about?
you dont know whats inside until you get there and look around, sometimes you have a good idea whats there and can be predictable at websites (or stores) you frequently go to, but when opening unknown URLs (or visiting new stores) you have no idea until you get there
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I assume by "nowhere else to go" they mean you are going to just go to another web page. So, what else would they suggest?
I would disagree with even that assessment, some clickables trigger downloads, or open a new window that contains only an image, or a video. Some clickable downloads trigger on download complete to launch an application, start an installation, etc. But for the most part, clicking on a link in content takes you to other content, with more clickable links. Seems like a good thing to me?
How is Ted suggesting it should really work? Clicking a link causes your car to start? Or a pizza to land on your desk? (ok we can kinda already do that)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You mean that thing that's supposed to be superior to the World Wide Web, but that's been in development hell for the last fifty years? (Duke Nukem Forever, most delayed software ever? Ha.) Someone needs to tell this guy that it doesn't matter how superior your invention is if no one ever sees it. Like Steve Jobs said, "Real artists ship."
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
I remember seeing this guy in Cringley's Triumph of the Nerds 2.0. I seem to remember his Xanadu system failing because it is exceedingly difficult to use in practice, however useful it sound in theory.
Can one of the greybeards here enlighten me as to what, exactly, Xanadu was?
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
He lists several very abstract complaints, without giving an example of at least one way in which he thinks it could be differently, and done better?
I'm not in complete disagreement with him that the web could be improved. For one thing, we've given website creators so much control over presentation, that there's no standard 'look' to hyperlinks anymore - ever been to a website and not even *realized* that one of the elements in the page was a link to something else?
Also, there's too much problem of link obfuscation - the problem of the user having absolutely no idea where a link will take them, because when they hover the mouse over the link, it just shows some useless javascript, or the site designer used some javascript to make something which is not a link behave like a link, but not actually give the user any feedback about where it goes to, or the link is rendered by Flash, and Flash never tells you where a link goes. I just hate that.
But, I'm not really sure that's what this guy was talking about. In fact, his complaints were *so* abstract, I have no idea what he was complaining about?
When you get down to it, files are based on documents, books, scrolls, etc. So by implication, the first known clay tablets being written in Sumeria, one could say our model of information storage and retrieval dates to about that time. I don't know how one could do it differently or better. Is he advocating having computers display spinning colorful text and mathematical gibberish like in the movies?
"The people who run the technology the last thing they want is something new to deal with,”
I dunno, I deal with end-users all the time and for the most part they aren't exactly eager to learn new software/hardware concepts either...
Yet another visionary wanting to do something different just for the sake being different. It's become popular lately to claim that particular industries or areas are doing it "all wrong", because naturally, if their whole process is "wrong", and you know the "right" way, then you're a genius right?
In reality, some things haven't changed in a long time because we've figured out something that works well. Every time I hear one of these "revolutionary" interface ideas they work well for the couple of examples that their creators can cite, but typically fall flat when you try to then adapt it to the entire world of computing.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I think that he poses valid points in the article and perhaps he said more that this little blurb of an article didn't relate, but I have 7 words for this person who wishes to remain relevant by telling everyone that we're doing it wrong:
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
So he hates the WWW, current OSs, and apparently apple pie and Grandma. Does he have any real constructive ideas he wishes to share with us? Either he's just talking out of his ass, or TFA is an extremely light fluff piece. Yeah, you hate what's out there. Where are your ideas for something better?
Perhaps this is why Xanadu has been vaporware for what, 50 years?
The problem w/ Ted Nelson's vision of a structured hypertext system w/ verified knowledge is that he hasn't been able to get from funding to actual, workable, profitable implementation. Tim Berners-Lee fought that battle and gave up, which gave his system the win when he changed ``universal resource locator'' to ``uniform...''. People aren't librarians, they aren't disciplined and they won't file every little bit which they write properly by category --- that's why search engines came into existence.
The world wide web works because it allows anyone access and doesn't force monetization, but it places on the user the burden of evaluating the web page accessed in terms of credibility, &c.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
“Windows and Macintosh’s thin veneer makes people think that they are in control of the device,” he said. “But it’s like being given plush toys to play with rather than having control over the structure of a device.”
This is quite true, the other side though is most people don't really want control of their computer they just want it to behave predictably.
“Computing is made up of files and directories and that’s a tradition left behind from the 1940s that no one questions,” he said. “Another tradition is that one file equals one document.”
Not so much, Mac has the concept of documents as directories of many files, MS Word and Open Office both use containers (zip files usually) to treat the many files as a single unit but the document is definitely many files. We certainly have files and directories at the heart of our storage structure, but it's a tradition of organization that goes back further than the 1940s, humans organize data into containers. The cool thing about most OS's (with the exception of DOS based) is that we can create links from one container to another without having to duplicate that data.
"Nelson’s philosophy toward computing is widely reported on being that a user interface should be so simple that in an emergency, a beginner is able to understand it within ten seconds."
Yep, and my kids picked up Windows, Gnome, KDE and Mac user interfaces in roughly that amount of time before kindergarten. UI is not perfect and we're always going to be trying things to get it better but it's pretty good when toddlers can learn it that fast.
To claim that something which is obviously usable by millions is simply wrong just has to be simply wrong.
I have a 2.5 years old cousin that can use the iPad and a Wii as good as my father. We are very good at this, the computing devices. Sure, we have made some trade ofs, so the most powerusers lose something (complex hotkey commands), and people good at abstract thinking lose something (the console)... but In the end we have something that is both easy to use, and powerfull. Will anything made by this dude be this balanced?
-Woof woof woof!
Grapes are Sour.
One thing they've mentioned on many occasions is that 404 errors bug the shit out of them. In the Xanadu system, all links were two-way, and you couldn't end up with a broken reference like that.
What sunk Xanadu, IMHO, is that it was much too ambitious. They were trying to make a framework to present the sum total of human knowledge. Still, some extremely clever work was done on that project, both before and during the Autodesk years.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So it is something you just dump something on! It is a big truck! It's not a series of tubes! Someone should tell Ted Stevens he got it wrong.
Qwerty key boards have been shown to be less effective than other layouts, but they are still used for over a century.
Qwerty may not be the best but it is "good enough" to get work and fun done (plus the common command keys just happen to all be on the left hand leaving the right hand free for the mouse/cursor).
Hypertext may be the same sort of thing. New organizational structures may appear, but in the end we still read/link pages/books/articles and audio/video and it seems he's talking about better ways of relevance links.
Lets see Ted Nelson's best shot at what should come next.
When all is said and done, more is said than done.
man who says impossible shouldn't interrupt man who does
So Teddy boy comes up with a concept, theorizes around, accomplishing (near) zilch building his ivory towers out of clouds for 20 years and he's complaining about the 50 million bazillion websites people have made, some of them actually useful? Jeeze, at least pretend to be relevant by helping pound a stake through the heart of Flash.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Ok guy who came up with one good idea 40 years ago and hasn't done anything new since... Thanks for your contribution. But I think you might be a bit out of the loop in regards to what's going on.
No Xanadu was a futurmistic house in Orlando made of spray foam insulation. It has since been demolished and lost in the mists of time. Among its wonders was it that was managed by these things called personal computers. (see, not totally OT)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Has it been released... or what?
What?
Happy Easter :)
Aww, somebody didn't make a billion dollars even though they are smarter than everyone else.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Windows, Macintosh and Linux have 'exactly the same' approach to computing
So I guess he would prefer that each manufacturer come up with a different approach for the WWW, so that Macs could not read documents created on Windows and vice versa?
And wanna be graphic designers. They tired to make the medium of the Web look and works just like the medium of prints. So now we have have to move our mouse over an item to see if it is a link or not. Or my pet peeve websites that have a fixed width or work best at one resolution. Really? I worked with one idiot once that gave me web pages to put up that where nothing but a matrix of GIF files! The web is fighting a real fight with the from over function people.
I agree with you on the mouse overs not showing you where a link will take you. If it is javascript then they should had a mouse over to the javascript that will tell you where the link is going. If it is flash then they should just be shot. While I would like to see Flash be removed from the face of the earth I can live it being used for some applications like games and other actual programs that run in a browser and Video playback until the whole HTML 5 video standard thing settles down if that ever happens.
But for Navigation! NEVER.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Okay Ted,
Instead of whining about things, why don't you actually write some code and fix them? And since Linux is open source, you can start there.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
If you want to show people how to do ti right you have to, well, actually SHOW people how it'd be done right. As in release something better. I can talk and talk all I like about how much better method X would be. I can have meetings, draw up vague standards and so on. Nobody is going to give a shit until I release a product that actually puts it in to practice.
The advantage HTTP has going for it is that it is actually live, on the net, NOW. It works, it gets data from servers to computers and combined with HTML it makes for a useful web that millions use all the time.
So if he's got this great, better, way of doing things let's see it then. Let's see the 1.0 release standard. Let's see the software that uses it. Because the thing is if it really is so much better, there is a possibility things would move to it. While legacy is a powerful force, that doesn't mean change never happens. It is entirely possible for new standards to rise up and displace old ones. Particularly if you can offer interoperability. Maybe "Amazing new standard X" can be implemented in such a way that browsers can use it or HTML, and that you can link back and forth. Then maybe the new standard starts to grow because it is so awesome.
However when all you do is whine about what exists and talk about how much better your thing will be when you get around to designing it, you do nothing useful.
The most hacked together, confusing, but released and on the market product is infinitely more useful than the best, slickest, pie-in-the-sky in development project. Until something is actually released it just isn't useful to regular people. You can talk all you like about how cool it is gonna be, we can't care because we can't use it until it is on the market.
...and then like, you would like, just connect the stuff together man, and things would just be there, and you would just be like "woah, man, I'm computing", and it would be more real than reality, man. Really though, what does he suggest as an alternative to files and folders and paragraphs??? It seems this guy's dropped too much acid for one lifetime. I'm for the idea of trying to innovate computer technology, but what does he suggest? Can anyone make sense of what he's trying to get at?
According to Ted Nelson entry on wikipedia:
"He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is credited with first use of the words transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and teledildonics."
So what next? He'll tell us that humanity is doing sex the wrong way and teledildonics is the way to go?
If you look at the rules he proposes you'll see that half of them are about restricting access and creating profit venues for the publishers.
Ted Nelson's view is a web where you have to pay for each page you visit. We have seen too much of this lately
Gee Ted, in your awful future, I would've be paying PER WORD.
Fuck you. You lost. Move on.
I think I follow, but it seems to me that would just encourage more "information overload" than what we've already got now!
I mean, one of the biggest problems I have with the web is that after using a search engine of choice to hunt down relevant links for a topic I need info on, I wind up being presented with a page or pages that link back to quite a few related (or loosely related) pages - giving me at least 2-3x as much to read through and comprehend than I initially had. When each of THOSE links feature more link-backs (and of course they're going to!), you reach a point where you have to just stop reading, or else get sucked into your information search becoming a day-long project.
Now, it sounds like this guy is saying, "It's really not good enough to rely on web page authors voluntarily and manually linking to some of the information they used when constructing their page! We need to have a system where you basically highlight/click on content you're using and have it automatically rolled into the new content you're making." Umm.... wow. Even if the whole WWW was constructed in a manner where this was part of its standard operation, it seems like it would lead to many readers going on a "chase to find the original source material", as they followed text back to its original sources, and then followed THAT source's related content back further, to try to find who really came up with a given concept or set of instructions. (It's part of human nature to try to get things from the "horse's mouth", so to speak.) It seems like this would wind up making it a waste of time for a lot of folks to try to summarize or re-interpret ideas and publish them, because people would tend to use their pages as nothing more than "launching points" to click back to read pages run by whoever provided content clippings that were referenced.
Look, I know this Ted Nelson is a brilliant guy and all, and I've seen his Xanadu creation, and it's a nice thought. But honestly, there are too many layers to things to be able to draw a solid line for what links to what. What part of an excerpt do you link? Back to the original book? Back to the dictionary for individual meanings of the words? Simultaneous links to other commentary? See what I'm saying? A word or phrase could have a multitude of links pointing every-which-way. It would be incomprehensible mess. Not to mention, it doesn't fit with the current state of Intellectual Property rights at all. It simply cannot work that way, as good as an idea that it is.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Putting aside the fact that this guy is being completely pedantic, the only real concrete ideas mentioned in the article are complete ripoffs of David Gelernter's work on changing file/folder structures. Watch this for a better explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gd6jX40Kn4 Then compare to this: “Computing is made up of files and directories and that’s a tradition left behind from the 1940s that no one questions,” he said. “Another tradition is that one file equals one document.” “[My approach] would be entirely different from today's documents where you look at one page at a time and you can see a ribbon or beam connecting documents together,” Gelernter proposed a system setup not around a traditional file based system, but rather chronology, much like the way the brain organizes memories.
The World Wide Web was designed?
There's some engineer out there with a license (that we can revoke) responsible for all this???
Have gnu, will travel.
So, he envisions a world where the hot chick working with the hero is able to h4xx0r the system to shut off The Device before it destroys the {airplane, ship, military base, power plant, city, region, country, world, universe}? Cool...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This is far from the first time where better technology loses to "[almost]-free", "immediately-available" and "open-source". We have UNIX verses VMS, Linux versus everything else, C++ versus Ojective-C, just to name a few.
Now and then the other ways wins as with Adobe, Apple, etc.
Nelson's vision for hyperlinks was far superior to the way it was actually done. He foresaw problems that we are still struggling with today and came up with solutions. But it is an illustration of the principle that sometimes perfection is the enemy of progress. Nelson never managed to get his vision off the ground because it required solving all of the big problems at once, requiring completely new systems. As a result, it was bypassed by a hacked-together approach that was half-assed, but that could be readily implemented on existing systems.
Add "src" to all HTML tags (not just img and object tags):
/>
<p src='http://someRemoteContent/page/#anchorToEmbed'
That way you're not just linking, your embedding documents and parts of documents. When the remote content is updated, your local content is updated. No "invisible links" to follow.
Done. Now where are my $Billions?
-CF
I remember Apple designing a way for a document to publish a part of it, and for other documents from other applications to be capable to subscribe to it, even without having the original application around.
All publications were automatically updated when the original document was modified, and all the subscriptions too upon opening the document that contained them.
This then was silently abandoned, maybe around the time the "MacOS" turned to Unix...
To me at the time this publish/subscribe way definitely was a revolution, that died.
Herve S.
You're right about him being abstract, so I'll illustrate with something concrete what he says about our current operating systems being stuck in an old and primitive design model. I'll use an example taken from the Unix family, although it applies to all current O/S types.
When you open an O/S file for reading, then read and display its contents and end by closing the file (eg. as the Unix "cat" utility does), there is no mechanism for the user to replace that file with a composite entity (say made up of many smaller files), in such a way that the unmodified "cat" can open the composite entity as a single plain file and read and display the aggregate data transparently. The O/S supports collections of files through directories, but it does not extend file semantics to those collections, nor does it allow new user-programmed semantics to be given to them in a way that would be transparent to other applications. Thus, files do not behave like objects in OOP.
It's just a small practical example of the legacy problem that Ted Nelson identifies quite accurately, although he works on a larger and more visionary canvas. There have been some efforts at overcoming this poverty of O/S semantics (FUSE is a very notable example), but nothing has managed to emerge out of tech space and catch on. The traditional O/S provides such a huge comfort zone that we're stuck with an inertia problem that seems to defeat any attempt at raising the power of core O/S semantics.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I believe the first hypertext project was Engelbart's NLS (oN-Line System): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)
We've known about issues like this since the early 90s. It's not news at all, really. The issue is that people are amazingly dumb when it comes to dealing with a huge wad of choices being thrown at them. The reason that it all evolved exactly as it did is because unless you only present people with a few clearly visible choices, there's simply a disconnect and nothing at all gets done. It's like the silly joke in tennis of throwing two balls at once at the other player. 95% of the time their brain does absolutely nothing for half a second.
Now multiply that times a million coders and people who have to make this all work together. (let alone the poor end users)
Reinventing the wheel while it's moving when most CIS graduates can't think for themselves any more thanks to our nearly useless testing and learning methods is asking for failure. You can thank middle and high schools for this for the most part. A generation of excellent test-takers who can't figure out how to deal with anything that involves real problem-solving.
These conventions came as a result of much earlier (basic) aspects of human society and our entire way of thinking is trained from birth to operate along these same guidelines. Yes, it's crude and inefficient, but it works and sometimes quick and effective-enough for now is exactly what we want.
Thanks for the link. The idea is brilliant and radical (and for perhaps the first time a youtube video where the comments underneath made sense ;-) ).
However structure of paper document he accuses of being limiting reflects how our brains are geared to work. Having all those parallel hypertexts and floating links would be quite distracting - cross linking on wikipedia for example is distracting enough on its own. Footnotes, references and asides are what they are for a reason - they are not the actual subject of the document - and hence should not distract the reader whose brain can process only one stream of thought at once.
Besides, as someone else note above, I can't see how this would scale with more than handful of documents. Who's to say what the URI for a piece of text is and where it lives? Does modifying one its "hyper references" modify every instance? And he needs to stop using cheesy terminologies like flinks (floating linnks, apparently!) if he wants to be taken seriously.
I'm starting to disagree, I think there's some neat stuff here.
At the moment though we have a copyright problem preventing the easy way of doing this, which is to make snapshot copies of the existing documents local to your own works so that the whole Xanadu'ed spread stays intact. It's like quoting from different editions of a book. Just because the author made a Second Edition doesn't stop you from quoting the first.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I like his idea, but it needs some help. People could already be structuring their web pages and web browsers this way, but it doesn't come naturally, so they don't. It needs to start with a structured community that doesn't bother worrying about the underlying code or where to host stuff. Like Facebook, for instance. Create a new Geocities-type service where people can create original documents, easily add referenced chunks from other peoples' documents, and spawn additional branched documents on the fly, all in a suitable GUI (hopefully better than the demo). If you structure the GUI so that Xanadu-like user behavior becomes more natural than the typical CLICK HERE behavior we have, you might have a chance.
The future of semantic web will be in the form of intelligent agents that understand language and auto parameterize information. Expecting humans to willingly take the time and effort to do it themselves to their source data manually is not realistic and a waste of time because it may not be known in advance the best way to organize for all consumers.
Besides there is no commercial incentive. Most of the Internet is run by money with a direct financial incentive to push their own crappy UI and nest of ads upon all who seek their information.
Personally I'm just thankful for wikipedia...
if he is such a genius, he'd be able to describe his idea clearly.
but he's only a man with an idea stuck in his head. he lacks the ability to describe his idea, and so makes up nonsense words to fill in the blanks.
i mean, wouldn't "source link" be easier for everyone to understand than "transclusion"? a source link is a link to the source, whereas a transclusion is ...
Reminds me of this Dilbert strip: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-09/
Ted Nelson is on drugs. plain and simple.
I had a sig, but
When you can just copy & paste any keyword or phrase into your search engine of choice to pull up documents, images, videos, shopping results, stock quotes, or any other information that you want. The problem with Xanadu style hypertexting is that it is driven by the content creators or worse - a group of authorities running Xanadu Central Command. Who is going to pay the content creators to add an infinite number of hyperlinks to content that may or may not provide any real value to the user/reader. How are they going to decide what content to hyperlink to? After all, not all content is created equal - some of it is accurate and relevant but much of it is not, and too much content on the web is auto-generated for SEO purposes so it is completely useless and incoherent babble.
... the WWW was not created primarily with the interests of content creators in mind. You've said this repeatedly over the last 40 years. Some of us even agree with you, but your vision would never have taken off on its own like the WWW did.
The WWW was built by engineers, who knew that requiring global two-way links was a complete non-starter. From building and running the pre-WWW internet, they knew that two-way linking would have been too fragile - requiring the cooperation of a remote server when linking to its content? Yikes!
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
This article is just drivel, it doesn't say anything. The Web is designed the way it is because it follows naturally from the way we as human beings think and work. If you have something better, don't tell me about it, show it to me.
3D interfaces might, and I emphasize MIGHT become useful when we have actual 3D displays. Until then, it is just messing about. Also I don't even know if it'll be useful then. I look at my desk, which is obviously a fully 3D environment, and my organization on it functions very much in a 2D fashion. Things may get stacked but only if they are similar, or if I'm being haphazard in which case the pile isn't an organization and I have to manually dig through it to find what I want. It isn't like I am able to organize things in 3 dimensions that is efficient and easy to use. Basically everything just gets laid out on the flat surface in piles.
Can it be that there is a generation of people who love tech and read slashdot every day but don't know who Ted Nelson is? Can you even understand the phrase "free software is like free love, not free beer" if you don't know anything about history? Wow.
I've heard Ted Nelson speak and even met him on a few occasions back in the day - I think it was around 1987. Ted Nelson is not a crackpot by any means - he is the real deal. He wrote a truly fantastic book called "Computer Lib" back in 1974 or so, advocating open and free personal computing long before the Apple I was invented. His vision of "HyperText" has two parts - one is an underlying philosophy that all information should be accessible and usable for whatever people want. The second is some technological solutions and implementation ideas on how to do this.
I think Dr. Nelson has a pretty good track record on the philosophy side. For instance, he discussed that links embedded into documents are a bad idea because they get broken and can only be placed there by the owner of the document. He discusses that links should always be two-way. That links should have known ownership. That the amount of linking (and nth-order linking) can be seen as a judgement of the value of a document. These are all spot-on. In fact, you could argue that Google's entire technology is based on applying a subset of Nelson's ideas to HTML.
HyperText (and HyperMedia) philosophy also is foretells the entire debate now on digital music and digital media, and DRM in general. This is again all written about two decades before we did QuickTime at Apple.
It is too bad that he has become more of a Cassandra these days.
My favorite quote from him is from a talk he was giving on computers and education. He starts by drawing a child and then a garden of delight that represents learning. Then he says "this is the teacher", and draws a brick wall between then. Then he says "Putting computers in the classroom changed all this" and he erases the word "teacher" under the brick wall and writes "computers". So true...
That's about as succinct a description of Project Xanadu as I can come up with. To some extent it is also like Calvin Mooers's TRAC macro processor that Nelson so effused about in _Computer Lib_, but which is pretty well unknown elsewhere. TRAC is a footnote in computer history, largely, I believe, because Mooers protected his intellectual property so darned well that everyone else shrugged and went on their own way.
So if files and folders are so wrong then why are is software development starting to adopt a similar structure, sure we can them namespaces instead of folders, classes instead of files, but really it is a hierarchical structure that allows us to put things in various organized locations.
This comment about 1 file=1 document, sure we do that, it makes sense. The Thing about complex applications, like games, they have several files, but would you really want an end user trying to send their document via email and missing the body section. The web uses multiple files to describe a page these days, you have at least one css, javascript files, and more, because it makes sense.
The problem with several "experts" is they think one way or the other is always the answer, in reality each aspect be it file structures, flow methodologies, or whatever else you look at in the world usually has a purpose and place (if it stays around for a while), but that does not mean it should be used by everyone for every situation.
So many wanna be experts around are just parrots, echoing out their favorite flavors, processes, standards, and garble. I have to deal with one at my work who wants to implement the latest trends of complexity because someone said it should be, it makes development slow and hard to maintain because he does not know when to use a specific architect and when it bogs things down. Unfortunately he has more sway in what we use than I do, I want these hacks to shut their pie holes and not speak until they have a broader experience base and can say when their architect is useful and when it is not with logic and reason.
If databases are so great why do we have files, if files are so great why do we have databases? Bottom line, this guy is a troll, trying to get his name out there, when in fact he is a hack job that has no real understanding of reality.
Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
This seems like a tilt to remove rogue members of a trusted network. But the "trust provider" is just lifting the issue to another set of players with the same problem. Who is the registrar for identification? How do we trust them? How is a registry of servers co-managed efficiently?
Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
This seems like stating the obvious, but combined with the above, can I operate independently without being "uniquely and securely identified" ?
Every user is uniquely and securely identified.
Anonymity is gone? Is there no belief in the "anonymous suggestion box" psychology that by staying anonymous, more participation can be encountered? This seems like another tilt towards tracking all actions and statements. Again, who is the identifier? What are the rules of privacy?
Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
Just like a Wiki. Can we comment on documents? Can we copy them? Can we derive new works based on them? Can we delete them?
Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.
Which means a document is a compound object that requires any number of translators from storage format to human-interface. Just like a, um, web site. Can a new data type be introduced? By whom?
Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
You cannot link to documents you do not own? You cannot link to general server locations, when therein it completes the query (index,default,home)?
Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
"Visible" seems ambiguous. Is the blue underlined word required? This seems to imply all links are bi-directional. Do I really want to see all the links to article (like those inane "trackback" comments on blogs)?
Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
What about deep linking? Can someone link to be bank statement? My email inbox? What is meant by "publication"? Not everything online should be public.
Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document.
So all links and downloads have a micropayment mechanism. Who is ensuring payment? How do public terminals (libraries, coffee shops) with anonymous users pay for content? What if someone operates a server "independently" and refuses payment but has captured and is serving the same content, or derived content? Do we have a "download police" ?
Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
By whom? How? What is a document? How are documents revoked?
Every document can have secure access controls.
If you look at the rules he proposes you'll see that half of them are about restricting access and creating profit venues for the publishers.
Ted Nelson's view is a web where you have to pay for each page you visit. We have seen too much of this lately
Let's go down the checklist to see how well the WWW complies or has a mechanism TO comply (as in, without forcing someone at knife point... or... Cranky Old Man Cane in Your Chest point):
Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified. - Not Done
Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network. - Local, Intranet, Internet, Done
Every user is uniquely and securely identified. - SSL, Done
Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents. - Google, Done
Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type. - HTML5
Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner. - Done
Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints. Pingback, Done (unless he means forcing reverse linking... HAHA, screw THAT!)
Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication. - Done, we just can't convince the RIAA/MPAA of that...
Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document. - Done (it says "can" contain "a royalty mechanism", so yes, there is not restrictions on the WWW that force a document to explicitly NOT contain a royalty mechanism)
Every document is uniquely and securely identified. - URI, Done
Every document can have secure access controls. - SSL, Done
Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored. Google (ever really know the drive letter of website pages you search for?), Done
Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location. Amazon EC2, Google, Facebook, Load balancing, blah blah blah, Done
Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster. Raid1,5, Done (unless he means forced mirroring, again SCREW THAT)
Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents. - Rackspace, Done
Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction. Part Done, SSL isn't the norm. But switch to SSL only, and Done.
The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged. - Done
Beyond that, there's a few good points left. SSL should be standard as proven by FireSheep/Facebook debacle. Um... More people need to mirror... oh gee, I guess there aren't really any points left, unless you wanna force backlinking. And, with all do respect, he can shove that up his Xanadu! We have enough ads and spam without being force to replicate links back to link farms.
I8-D
The structure of the web is way off. We're using browsers to access pages instead of sucker electrodes to enter the Other Plane
I have followed alternative presentations of knowledge for a long time, dabbling in creating systems for pseudo-3D presentation of information, using various types of mind mapping and collaborative knowledge systems. The reality is that the web succeeded and the various competitors failed precisely because of the "poor" implementation choices of the current nightmare of kludged together technologies are "worse is better" type work. Would it be nice to have a better framework? Sure, but not at the cost of paralysis.
Xanadu wants to give strict copyright enforcement with a pay-as-you-eat system for consumption. The implementations have been plagued by pulling the rug out from under any implementer who gets "close" to a solution, usually with accusations that the implementer was trying to steal his technology. The Xanadu system is intended (as far as I have seen: the implementations never got far enough to tell for sure) to allow distributed content, but always with verification of the original source material's permissions and state. In short: the project is surrounded by control freak symptoms.
Maybe we will have such systems in the future, but they will stand along side the chaos that is the open Internet and I'm glad for it. For every neat feature I like about Xanadu, there is a control freak feature that takes away from the free-form nature of the existing Internet. Xanadu would make a great academic knowledge system, perhaps a real authoritative online Wikipedia where people with actual knowledge contributed and could avoid random yahoo intervention on their work. But I would never want to live with it as the only implementation of hyperlinking.
Sig under construction since 1998.
I was around for the period when Autodesk owned Xanadu, and met all the players. Nelson talked a good game, but didn't have the right idea.
The big problem with Xanadu, in retrospect, is that it was more of a payment system than an information-distribution system. Nelson had attracted a number of "the solution to everything is a market" people, and they'd designed a complex system of multi-way micropayments. Xanadu was set up as a pay per view source-code management system. You paid to read, and if you checked something in, you'd get paid for your contribution if others read it. Many people could edit the same thing and create forks, there was a merging process, and it was all very complicated.
This seemed reasonable at the time. Lexis, Nexis, and Mead Data Central were all successful centralized high-end pay per view document retrieval systems. Xanadu was a fancier version of such systems.
The envisioned pricing was very high. People were talking about documents costing $20 to $100 and upwards. The initial application was seen as a distribution system for financial newsletters. (There's a whole world of expensive financial newsletters that investors buy. For maybe $100 a month you get a few pages of financial advice. Some newsletters are worth it.)
Also, Nelson was very text-focused. Xanadu didn't do images, let alone streaming audio or video. How would you price an edit to an image?
The basic flaw in the Xanadu concept was simply that user attention, not content creation, turned out to be the scarce resource. We thus have a mostly free / ad supported information economy, rather than a pay-per-view one.
Thanks for the link. Drawbacks would appear to be display size, and copyright. His source document is public domain, and for those you could have deep linkage back to source. But in a copyright crazy world the sourcing aspect would have some annoying limits. Still, I can imagine it being useful for all manner of other things. I would like to see a demo of what he described with regard to multimedia editing.
Loose lips lose spit.
You're pretty good AC but you missed a piece. The "ProCopyright" (in quotes!) people are definitely ProDRM. But satirically, they're developing SWAT Team of Borg. "How well your unauthorized copies work is irrelevant. That file is not authorized. Your life is over. Resistance is futile".
Torrented copies don't "reward" people if the other half of the risk matrix is at ridiculous as it is becoming now. Again with more satire, they would like you to issue a certified request for every file you receive on a computer.
You're right about it not being about money - it's about their love of control *pretending* it is about money. It was never about the artists. Control is sexy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Mr. Nelson seems to think the flaw in current operating systems is in their desktop metaphor. Well, that metaphor has worked quite well for the masses, since, well, it's a good metaphor that is easily understood by most people (with specific western cultural biases, mind you).
Certainly the desktop metaphor may get to the point where people don't understand the metaphor anymore, but that is not happening anytime soon. A current example would be why is there a picture of a floppy disk to save data? Would any 8th grader know what a floppy disk is? If not, how does that icon make any sense at all?
The desktop metaphor, for the most part, still makes perfect sense for most people.
I feel like the rise of mobile devices acts as an insurgency on this very issue. To the extent that someone laid out a web page as "a matrix of GIF files", then it won't work on a small mobile device screen. If you commit to providing tailor-made graphic designs for every device, hopefully you'll fall behind shops that properly abstract the layout. It's good to have radically different displays widespread in the world, as it forces designers to deal with this very principle.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
After looking at the Xanadu Website, I see why he thinks the WWW is wrong. Hey, 1998 called and wants its geocities site back!
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
It doesn't just fail for mobile it just fails. Screen readers for the sight impaired can not read the page, You can not enlarge the fonts to make it easier to read, it is just a mess from start to finish. I agree with you that is what should happen but I still believe that the real problem is a failure to embrace the medium.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"...Having to refer to a paragraph and a sentence in an e-mail is just so barbaric when you could just strike it out and make the connection between sentences..."
WTF does this mean?
Next he'll be telling us he invented the question mark.
Proverbs 21:19
I agree with your diagnosis, but sight-impaired screen readers are a market small enough to be ignored. Mobile devices aren't.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I disagree. The moral implications of ignoring the sight impaired market just to make a pretty picture and it is easy I feel are self evident. They company I work for will not do that and I will not do that.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I don't have any Native or African Americans.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Well, market forces and moral obligations are not the same thing, eh? I do hope this is a case where the market forces surrounding a great variety of very different screens benefit the sight impaired along with the rest of us. Whether it does or not, kudos for your company.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Single Sourcing is a term in the publishing industry that allows you to repurpose content. To do it you hold the content in small parts and then compose it.
This guys system could be based easily on the single sourcing open source code base.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/
It is designed to run in a browser too.
The end result is a open document format
There is also webODF which loads open documents into the browser and render them using plain html5, javascript and heavy use of css.
http://www.webodf.org/
The 3D aspects of navigating from an Open document to see all its links could be done using the CSS transforms perhaps.
I think his idea is create, and you can choose to see the finsihed docuemtn OR the 3D linsk version. SO best of both world.
i agree. Ted's project is similar.
The link data project and the RDF and SparSql aspects are highly useful IF they can get it all open source and get people using it.
because its part of the W3C it has a good chance of gong somewhere.
There are some Gui toolits based on top of it too now. There is a nice demo here.
http://www.aloha-editor.org/
http://wiki.iks-project.eu/index.php/VIE%5E2_Backbone_Mappings
what about blog trackbacks (or were they called pingbacks?), but for any/all documents.
Thanks for the Kudos but the simple truth is that if you HTML and don't use Flash making a website that is screen reader friendly is just not that hard to do.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.