Sure, I can put together a pretty sweet hypertext document in Flash where dynamic linking of useful information takes place in real-time, but just try to print it out -- it'd be useless.
Is that how you use, for example, Wikipedia then? Is that how you use a blog? Do you print out separate Slashdot articles, mostly ignoring comments, and certainly ignoring that these are inherently cross-referenced and not really hierarchical?
These technologies, that are what a lot of web use in recent years are about, are artificially grafted over the WWW architecture, and to their own detriment...
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.
For years, hierarchy simulation and paper simulation have been imposed throughout the computer world and the world of electronic documents. Falsely portrayed as necessitated by "technology," these are really just the world-view of those who build software. I believe that for representing human documents and thought, which are parallel and interpenetrating- some like to say "intertwingled"- hierarchy and paper simulation are all wrong.
This note is to announce a very special and very different piece of open-source software you can download and use now, for electronic documents radically different from anything out there- and a bigger plan.
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.
It's time for an alternative to today's document systems, and we the loyal opposition have a proposal.
>>>Humanists please jump to transliterature.org, since what follows will be somewhat technical.
But first, some background. This will take a while.
BEFORE THE WEB, A GREATER DREAM
Long before there was a World Wide Web, there was a project with greater intent. This was Project Xanadu*, a bunch of clever, cynical idealists who believed in a dream of world-wide hypertext- somewhat like the web, but deeper and more powerful and more integrated, rooted in literary ideas, and mindful from the beginning of the copyright problems that would come. The project started unofficially in 1960 when I began to think about world-wide screen publishing, but grew to involve about a hundred participants and supporters over the last half-century.
(Note that I flip between "we" and "I" because this piece culminates work and ideas shared by a number of others over the decades; but I am presently acting alone, so whenever appropriate I am including those others by pronoun.)
Even from the beginning, we planned on unrestricted publishing of hypertext by millions of people; but web-like documents were only the beginning, only one possible form.
The Xanadu project asked at the beginning- not, "How do we imitate paper?", but "What if we could write in midair, without enclosing rectangles? What new ways can thoughts be connected and presented?" Many ideas and screen maneuvers came to mind, but they always sharpened down to this question: "How can electronic documents on the screen IMPROVE on paper?" And our key answer was: "Keep each quotation connected to its original context."
This idea (now called "transclusion") is the center of our work and the center of my own beliefs. I
Sorry, the first sentence is supposed to be the summary. I offered the second part, as a quote, if the editors wanted to reproduce this (as they do for book reviews etc.), but they've chosen to just bang it all together to make one of the longest summaries I've ever seen!
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)...
You went the whole way through my visible posting history making 'ad hominem' attacks (as you're so fond of saying to everyone) just because I called you a karma whore.
You've now started again...
You are a karma whore, a hypocrite and a borderline stalker - I have nothing more to say to you.
You went the whole way through my visible posting history making 'ad hominem' attacks (as you're so fond of saying to everyone) just because I called you a karma whore.
You've now started again...
You are a karma whore, a hypocrite and a borderline stalker - I have nothing more to say to you.
I understand that you're concerned about maintaining a high level of karma, Barry
You understand nothing. I do not care about my rating here. This place used to be a handy place to pick up on tech news and occassonally engage in informed debate and pick up on another perspective. Now it's just full of recyclers like you, like worms writhing through their own waste. Please do not respond - I've better things to do...
I do - I have lectured at one of the top-rated Comp Sci research universities in the UK. I do not substitute for a lack of knowledge, ability and recognitiion in the real world by trying to build up some sort of profile on the web for recycled news and opinion - like self-important little Slashdot karma whores...
You went the whole way through my visible posting history making 'ad hominem' attacks (as you're so fond of saying to everyone) just because I called you a karma whore.
You've now started again...
You are a karma whore, a hypocrite and a borderline stalker - I have nothing more to say to you.
You got modded down and I explained exactly why what you said was wrong. That you refuse to accept what everyone else thinks doesn't mean you've won the argument, it means you're a social retard....
You went the whole way through my visible posting history making 'ad hominem' attacks (as you're so fond of saying to everyone) just because I called you a karma whore.
You've now started again...
You are a karma whore, a hypocrite and a borderline stalker - I have nothing more to say to you.
Have you considered starting your own news site, Barry? Indeed, considering that you're such an expert on all matters you should easily be able to create and run such a website, no?
Perhaps in the sense that I work in the Semantic Web research community (and hence know TBL's work rather better than you, and actually know and understand Gopher and Xanadu - let's face it, that's the difference between us, and the reason you're so sore at my comment to you).
Also perhaps unlike you, though, I actually have that job to do, and don't have the time or the patience to pretend I'm some kind of 'Internet presence', and certainly not to go through other people's journal histories and make personal attacks to prop up my ego.
I'm sorry that I call a spade a spade (or a karma whore) when I see it, and I'm sorry I happened to coincidentally react negatively to two of your posts within one afternoon. Seriously, though, get a life - go do something else.
Going back this far to make an off-topic personal attack is just pathetic and I will not respond to you any further, save for a stock response.
Yes, the correct term is not spam, it's karma whoring: CyricZ fills Slashdot with pointless, tangential and redundant karma whoring posts and, due to the poor quality of moderation these days, he gets modded up as often as not, his ego grows, and then he has pointless off-topic arguments with anyone who objects.
Indeed, you did lose the debate to him quite badly, Barry.
If you think so, good for you, I truly do not care what you think because, despite your using my first name (like you're a fucking genius for reading it from the screen), I do not know you and wouldn't care if you ascended to heaven or if you caught fire... go find something else to amuse yourself, you sad little troll.
When one cannot debate on the points of the issue, then one must often resort to name calling, and thus has lost the debate.
Are you an idiot? That's precisely the point I was making - you think one wins a debate by telling someone you wish to neuter them? Did you check the other responses to this guy and how many times he was modded down?
So I (on a completely separate thead), and others, called you a karma whore... you are! Deal with it...
The WWW didn't 'bring together' HTTP and HTML, it defined them: one as a protocol for exchange (HTTP), and the other as the format of messages to be exhanged (HTML, also GET requests, linked by the concept of URLs).
The things actually brought together were the concepts of a stateless client/server architecture for document transfer (a la Gopher) and (a poor approximation to) hyperlinking in HTML.
As a side note, you're the least informed, most self-important little karma whore I've seen in weeks...
Jam is a type of fruit preserve made by boiling fruit with sugar to make an unfiltered jelly. Jam is often spread on bread and also as a culinary sweetener, for example in yogurt.
The use of cane sugar to make jam and jelly can be traced back to the 16th century when the Spanish came to the West Indies, where they preserved fruit, but the Greek technique of preseving quinces by boiling them in honey was included in the Roman cookery book associated with the name Apicius.
The proportion of sugar and fruit varies according to the type of fruit and its ripeness, but a rough starting point is equal weights of each. When the mixture reaches a temperature of 104 C, the acid and the pectin in the fruit react with the sugar, and the jam will set on cooling. However, most cooks work by trial and error, bringing the mixture to a "fast rolling boil", watching to see if the seething mass changes texture, and dropping tiny samples on a plate to see if they run.
here in Britain all the big shops insist on selling cheap vegetables from the third-world rather than home-grown produce, hurting our own argricultural industry
I'm sorry, but Israel, Spain, Portugal and South Africa are not Third World countries...
I'm European, and you're talking fucking bollocks. Europe gives MASSIVE subsidies to farmers. European supermarkets squeeze third-world countries over prices. I don't see Europe developing anti-AIDS drugs and distributing them for free. Get down of your fucking high horse.
Dude, I grew up farming and my wife has a high-level position in the pharma industry in the UK (at a very large company that does have a licensing agreement with Third World countries on anti-retroviral drugs) - I think you should STFU (and mind your language) and go and get informed.
For the record, I actively support scrapping the CAP, and included Europe in what I was saying (go back and read) - I was not just attacking the US.
Still, this argument's clearly going nowhere since, from your Utopian vision, you know as little about economics as you do about politics...
All those hot Italian, and Dutch, and Swedish ladies - what a waste of sweet womanflesh that would be. Wouldn't mind neutering you though [...] given the inanity of your posts.
I can't believe you're anything more than a troll after this - I refuse to even respond any longer to someone this hypocritical and deranged.
Slashdot Mirror
These technologies, that are what a lot of web use in recent years are about, are artificially grafted over the WWW architecture, and to their own detriment...
As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are features of Wiki that are closer to Ted Nelson's ideas in Xanadu than made it into the plain WWW...
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at hyperland.com/trollout.txt
and xanadu.com/trollout.txt
Permission is given to redistribute this but only in its entirety.
Dear World:
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.
For years, hierarchy simulation and paper simulation have been imposed throughout the computer world and the world of electronic documents.
Falsely portrayed as necessitated by "technology," these are really just the world-view of those who build software. I believe that for representing human documents and thought, which are parallel and
interpenetrating- some like to say "intertwingled"- hierarchy and paper simulation are all wrong.
This note is to announce a very special and very different piece of open-source software you can download and use now, for electronic documents radically different from anything out there- and a bigger plan.
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.
It's time for an alternative to today's document systems, and we the loyal opposition have a proposal.
>>>Humanists please jump to transliterature.org, since what follows will be somewhat technical.
But first, some background. This will take a while.
BEFORE THE WEB, A GREATER DREAM
Long before there was a World Wide Web, there was a project with greater intent. This was Project Xanadu*, a bunch of clever, cynical idealists who believed in a dream of world-wide hypertext- somewhat like the web, but deeper and more powerful and more integrated, rooted in literary ideas, and mindful from the beginning of the copyright problems that would come. The project started unofficially in 1960 when I began to think about world-wide screen publishing, but grew to involve about a hundred participants and supporters over the last half-century.
(Note that I flip between "we" and "I" because this piece culminates work and ideas shared by a number of others over the decades; but I am presently acting alone, so whenever appropriate I am including those others by pronoun.)
Even from the beginning, we planned on unrestricted publishing of hypertext by millions of people; but web-like documents were only the beginning, only one possible form.
The Xanadu project asked at the beginning- not, "How do we imitate paper?", but "What if we could write in midair, without enclosing rectangles? What new ways can thoughts be connected and presented?" Many ideas and screen maneuvers came to mind, but they always sharpened down to this question:
"How can electronic documents on the screen IMPROVE on paper?" And our key answer was: "Keep each quotation connected to its original context."
This idea (now called "transclusion") is the center of our work and the center of my own beliefs. I
Sorry, the first sentence is supposed to be the summary. I offered the second part, as a quote, if the editors wanted to reproduce this (as they do for book reviews etc.), but they've chosen to just bang it all together to make one of the longest summaries I've ever seen!
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)...
You went the whole way through my visible posting history making 'ad hominem' attacks (as you're so fond of saying to everyone) just because I called you a karma whore.
You've now started again...
You are a karma whore, a hypocrite and a borderline stalker - I have nothing more to say to you.
You went the whole way through my visible posting history making 'ad hominem' attacks (as you're so fond of saying to everyone) just because I called you a karma whore. You've now started again... You are a karma whore, a hypocrite and a borderline stalker - I have nothing more to say to you.
You've now started again...
You are a karma whore, a hypocrite and a borderline stalker - I have nothing more to say to you.
You got modded down and I explained exactly why what you said was wrong. That you refuse to accept what everyone else thinks doesn't mean you've won the argument, it means you're a social retard....
You've now started again...
You are a karma whore, a hypocrite and a borderline stalker - I have nothing more to say to you.
Also perhaps unlike you, though, I actually have that job to do, and don't have the time or the patience to pretend I'm some kind of 'Internet presence', and certainly not to go through other people's journal histories and make personal attacks to prop up my ego.
I'm sorry that I call a spade a spade (or a karma whore) when I see it, and I'm sorry I happened to coincidentally react negatively to two of your posts within one afternoon. Seriously, though, get a life - go do something else.
Going back this far to make an off-topic personal attack is just pathetic and I will not respond to you any further, save for a stock response.
Yes, the correct term is not spam, it's karma whoring: CyricZ fills Slashdot with pointless, tangential and redundant karma whoring posts and, due to the poor quality of moderation these days, he gets modded up as often as not, his ego grows, and then he has pointless off-topic arguments with anyone who objects.
*Yawn* Night then...
So I (on a completely separate thead), and others, called you a karma whore... you are! Deal with it...
I don't need advice on karma, thanks. Mine's been excellent since before you joined.
Glad you can read usernames though, that's right impressive...
Rubbish - an author doesn't 'bring together' chapters of a book, he writes a book.
'Put together' you might say, but 'bring together' means they already existed, apart from you.
Sorry, I thought that in order to karma whore we could just post any old crap and get modded up...
The things actually brought together were the concepts of a stateless client/server architecture for document transfer (a la Gopher) and (a poor approximation to) hyperlinking in HTML.
As a side note, you're the least informed, most self-important little karma whore I've seen in weeks...
Jam is a type of fruit preserve made by boiling fruit with sugar to make an unfiltered jelly. Jam is often spread on bread and also as a culinary sweetener, for example in yogurt.
The use of cane sugar to make jam and jelly can be traced back to the 16th century when the Spanish came to the West Indies, where they preserved fruit, but the Greek technique of preseving quinces by boiling them in honey was included in the Roman cookery book associated with the name Apicius.
The proportion of sugar and fruit varies according to the type of fruit and its ripeness, but a rough starting point is equal weights of each. When the mixture reaches a temperature of 104 C, the acid and the pectin in the fruit react with the sugar, and the jam will set on cooling. However, most cooks work by trial and error, bringing the mixture to a "fast rolling boil", watching to see if the seething mass changes texture, and dropping tiny samples on a plate to see if they run.
For the record, I actively support scrapping the CAP, and included Europe in what I was saying (go back and read) - I was not just attacking the US.
Still, this argument's clearly going nowhere since, from your Utopian vision, you know as little about economics as you do about politics...