[HN Gopher] OpenXanadu
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OpenXanadu
Author : warent
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-07-24 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (xanadu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (xanadu.com)
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| a quote from the system: "Adam and Lilith began to fight. She
| said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie
| beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the
| bottom position, while am to be in the superior one.' Lilith
| responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both
| created from the earth."
|
| That's just a few seconds of clicking around in systems like
| this. It's like surfing with a fucking jetpak.
|
| Spend a few minutes with the demo and try to, "feel" the concept.
| I would pay huge amounts of money to have all my research
| materials, "Xanadu'd." (Anyone looking to be hired?)
| johnorourke wrote:
| I remember reading about the never-ending story of Xanadu in a
| 1992 issue of Dr Dobbs Journal, which my local newsagent had to
| order specially for me... no web in those days. Imagine: there
| will be developers reading this who weren't even born when it was
| _already_ vapourware!
| EarlKing wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but it feels like Xanadu was always
| vaporware for a very important reason: It never had a
| specification concrete enough to implement because its chief
| architect always came off like a schizophrenic. I can't be
| alone in thinking that. No one who's read any of the numerous
| papers and books surrounding this fiasco can walk away thinking
| it's author is sane. There's just something about that "stream
| of consciousness" style of all Ted Nelson's papers that point
| to there being something fundamentally wrong with him.
|
| I say all this not to be a dick, mind you, but to point out
| that when something has been vapoware for decades that maybe
| it's time to ignore the guy who's at the heart of it and, if
| there's anything useful in it, move on without him. The world
| did that as far as hypertext goes. Now if only the world could
| do that with GNU.
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| There's a fine line between schizophrenia and creative genius
| and Nelson walks that line enormously all things considered.
| Project Xanadu aside Computer Lib and his work on HyperText
| systems in the 1960's are still incredibly ahead their time.
| Nelson is a pioneer on the same level as McCarthy, Kay, or
| Minsky but he didn't come up the way that they did. He's
| firstly a filmmaker; I think a lot of people miss this.
|
| It's worth noting that Brenda Laurel, Alan Kay, Nelson, and
| Seymour Papert had, "art" backgrounds. The future of
| computing will effectively be led by people with these cross-
| sectional skills. There's a reason programmers are shitty at
| designing software.
| kabes wrote:
| Ted also got into fights with almost everybody he ever worked
| with on Xanadu
| EarlKing wrote:
| Did he? This is a part of the story I've never heard. Got
| any stories / links?
| mepian wrote:
| > Now if only the world could do that with GNU.
|
| What do you mean? GNU is not vaporware, many people use it on
| top of Linux. Do you mean GNU/Hurd?
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| It's people like you that killed FOSS and I'm glad Stallman
| got pedo-cancelled.
| EarlKing wrote:
| GNU is Generally Not Usable in any real sense. I say that
| as someone who has to use Linux and FreeBSD on a daily
| basis. That said, yes, Hurd is the biggest example of the
| failure of GNU.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I'm not clear: Linux and FreeBSD are GNU products? I
| didn't know! I scoured www.gnu.org, and couldn't find
| either there. (GNU/Linux refers to a GNU userland coupled
| with Linux, you know.)
|
| I've been using Emacs happily for going on 40 years.
| Thanks for alerting me that Emacs is Generally Not
| Usable. I didn't know.
| EarlKing wrote:
| You know precisely that Linux and FreeBSD both depend
| upon GNU utilities. ("GNU/Linux refers to a GNU userland
| coupled with Linux") Don't be obtuse. If Emacs works for
| you then that's great, but if you are at all interested
| in having a system that works then you should be prepared
| to hear that for other people your preferred solution
| doesn't work, and why, be prepared to acknowledge that,
| and accept that something should be done to fix that.
| Responding with hostility is not at all productive and is
| precisely why GNU remains unusable for the majority.
| quesera wrote:
| Your argument seems to be that GNU has failed because it
| isn't the majority choice for general purpose computing
| systems.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong, because that makes no sense at
| all.
| quesera wrote:
| FreeBSD does not depend on GNU utilities.
| msla wrote:
| The Web existed in 1992 (invented 1989) just not for you.
| Gopher also existed by then (1991) and you maybe see the
| problem: The real world gave people something usable long
| before Xanadu could even begin to get off the ground. The same
| thing happened with the Internet versus OSI: The Internet
| protocol suite rendered the OSI protocols mostly irrelevant to
| the point people now insist OSI is just a model and the
| protocols are never mentioned. Insisting that we all think in
| terms of a seven-layer model while using SMTP instead of X.400
| for email is some delicate mix of funny and infuriating
| otherwise known only to the parents of small children.
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| Legend is that at CERN they flipped a coin to decide whether they
| would choose Xanadu or Tim Berner Lee's WWW as their Hypertext
| system.
|
| That day coins failed us.
| NonNefarious wrote:
| Animats wrote:
| Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. It's a micropayment model.
| When you read, you pay, and the payments are distributed, word by
| word, to all the creators of the input text. It's for storing
| expensive information in expensive computers to be sold
| expensively. Think of it as a successor to Mead Data Central,
| Lexis, and Nexis[1], early centralized and expensive information
| retrieval systems. (Those are still around, merged into Reed
| Elsevier, publisher of expensive books and journals.)
|
| The technology became cheap enough that such a business model was
| unnecessary. Although it was considered in the early days of the
| Web. Early thinking was that you'd have to subscribe to
| everything, and there would be charges on your Internet bill for
| each service, like cable TV. You'd pay to subscribe to a search
| engine. The New York Times went that route successfully, but few
| others did.
|
| I knew some of the people behind Xanadu in the 1980s. They were
| mostly everything-is-a-market libertarians.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| A very informative post. I think a lot of the young people hip
| to Nelson miss this point. I'm no longer a, "free and open
| everything" kind of person but Nelson is far more of a BioShock
| character than you'd think. He's not a baby boomer in any
| sense; he's a child of Welles, Hawks, and Howard Hughes. I
| could see him being old enough not to freak out over Birth Of A
| Nation.
|
| God bless that crazy bastard. We used to make Americans so
| well.
| hgazx wrote:
| This crashed the safari tab on my iPhone, lol.
| [deleted]
| woleium wrote:
| Wait, what? What does this show?
|
| The link goes to an example. The front page of the site says the
| following, whish doesn't help much:
|
| The computer world is not just technicality and razzle-dazzle. It
| is a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With
| ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON.
|
| We hope for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an
| additional standard-- electronic documents with visible
| connections.
|
| We propose a new kind of writing-- PARALLEL PAGES, VISIBLY
| CONNECTED.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| It's a fascinating dead end in the history of hypertext. Ted
| Nelson has always come across to me as either 51% visionary and
| 49% crackpot, or the other way 'round. Technically, Xanadu's
| bidirectional links and document transclusion (e.g., not just
| including links but whole sections of other web pages in yours)
| are really interesting. From a copyright standpoint, they're
| kind of a mess, and an integral idea of Xanadu is essentially
| being able to make links and embedded microdocuments require
| micropayments for usage and/or inclusion, which sounds like the
| kind of thing that people who don't like libertarians use to
| parody libertarian ideas. And, from a practical standpoint,
| they've just never gone anywhere -- as far as I can tell, in no
| small part because Mr. Nelson is apparently impossible to work
| with.
|
| Earlier discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827
|
| A famous (and infamous) article, "The Curse of Xanadu", on "the
| longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing,
| a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair"
| (now closer to 50 years and counting):
| https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
|
| I don't think I'd actually clicked through and seen this demo
| before, though, which adds some interesting new objections to
| it on my end -- I find the user experience here ugly and
| cryptic. I'm sure a much nicer one with these ideas could be
| made, but it seems oddly telling that Xanadu's proponents think
| this -- and the Xanadu web site in general -- are great ways to
| sell the ideas.
| sedatk wrote:
| Xanadu was the original project in which the term "hypertext"
| was coined. It's the primary influence over all hypertext
| things, including HTML. Its intended use was "directly embedded
| documents" instead of clicking through links. So, this web site
| just revives that original idea. I agree that its novelty over
| web model is still questionable, but that's how significant it
| is.
| [deleted]
| devd00d wrote:
| Yeah, I dont get it either.
| patrec wrote:
| Imagine web had actual support for hypertext. Then you
| couldn't just "hotlink" images, but also "hotlink" (i.e.
| natively quote, and annotate) textual content, with arbitrary
| start and end-points. As it is, html can't can't even express
| the equivalent of margin notes or footnotes, because it has
| some braindamaged ideas about inline vs block elements and
| the former can't contain the latter (they changed the
| nomenclature, but I'm pretty sure the limitation remains).
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| SGML, the meta-language on which HTML is based, has
| entities ie text expansion variables bound to the content
| of external resources accessed via URLs or file names. So
| HTML _itself_ doesn 't need such mechanisms if it's
| understood that general markup facilities of SGML are
| available (which however isn't the case with browsers). XML
| (XInclude) attempted to establish more granular inclusion
| of external document fragments via XPath, but failed on the
| web. Even _if_ HTML had transclusion, what would the use
| case look like? HTML as a markup vocabulary was introduced
| for casual academic publishing at CERN, reusing folklore
| SGML markup elements that were already widely used at the
| time. You can argue that HTML has been effectively stagnant
| while everything around it (CSS and JS) was changed ad
| absurdum to cater for HTML 's limitations, but still in an
| academic setting, you'll use inline citations or block
| quotes with references to sources, just as HTML is
| providing.
| asoneth wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is that Project Xanadu predates the
| web by a decade or so. Whereas the web settled on simple
| unidirectional links embedded in linear text documents, Ted
| Nelson's Xanadu was aiming for bidirectional transclusion and
| nonlinear documents ("zippered lists").
|
| Reading old papers from Nelson, Engelbart, or Bush is a lot of
| fun, though it can sometimes take a little work to get into a
| pre-internet headspace. I don't read very many authors these
| days who are attempting to rethink fundamental computer
| interface concepts like that, though there are a few.
| coldblues wrote:
| Huge inspiration for many of the features present in tools such
| as Obsidian, Logseq and Roam Research.
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(page generated 2022-07-24 23:00 UTC)