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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.
“[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?
"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?
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."
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.
Basically he's arguing for bringing that even further. For example, in Wikipedia, there's a separate main page and discussion page, and on the discussion page, things have to be categorized and organized. Under his model, instead of having this, a person that wished to lodge a new comment or question about a certain bit of text would highlight the text they were commenting on, do some sort of drag-and-drop-like operation to comment on it, and write their comments.
Then another user browsing the comments would do so by browsing the main document, and hovering over a word they would be able to see a list of comments made on "phrases" (using the term loosely) containing that word.
I suspect the people that dream of wikifying the legislative process have similar ideas about granular live documents, as that would be where this type capability would be needed most obviously.
Someone had to do it.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
... 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.
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
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.
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...
Absolute bullshit. If there is an epitome of rhetorical nonsense, this one is.
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.
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.
If everything was sourced this way, we'd be better able to see if multiple sources were all in agreement, or if a single source was being disproportionately referenced.