[HN Gopher] The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu
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The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu
Author : warpspin
Score : 115 points
Date : 2023-08-20 09:58 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maggieappleton.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maggieappleton.com)
| predictsoft wrote:
| Collaborated with Ted on Zigzag.
|
| Gzz - the open source finnish-developed Zigzag port - had
| incredible views like MindSundew. It was brilliant.
|
| The project failed when Ted wouldn't commit to going open source.
|
| It's a shame the project is dead now, because it solves problems
| like 2-way links. Using cursors which can 'sit' on a cell and
| disconnect when done.
| gardenfelder wrote:
| https://gzigzag.sourceforge.net/
| nologic01 wrote:
| > The idea of the bi-directional link goes back to 1945 when
| Vannevar Bush dreamed up the Memex machine
|
| Ponder that.
|
| It does feel that in 2023 (= the remote future) the ambition to
| explore the full phase space of digital technology has flatlined
| in the face of oppressive "reality". False representations,
| enshittification, exploitation, dependency instead of bold
| visions of empowerment and augmentation.
|
| Yet future generations might revisit these visions, implement
| them in non-conforming software and reap the benefits that were
| denied to us. Thus documenting them in detail acts like these
| seed banks in the Arctic.
| Chiba-City wrote:
| [dead]
| mikae1 wrote:
| Ted Nelson himself has made a video series on Xanadu that is
| worth watching. The first episode:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac
| spookthesunset wrote:
| That is a pretty low number of views for something like this
| project.
| teucris wrote:
| Great article so far, even if just examined for its prose:
|
| > One feels like the dinner guest who has stumbled into a raging
| martial argument over unwashed tea towels. You don't dare ask for
| context.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| For the last couple of years WonderOS has explored what a return
| to first principles OS design might look like today and there are
| definitely parallels to Xanadu with explicit callouts to
| Hypercard, Vannevar Bush and Engelbert if you explore the Lab
| Notes from the developer which are very thoughtful.
|
| ".... an itemized user environment. The item is an alternative
| boundary for our digital things which may let us interact with
| our devices more fluidly, and reflect our thinking more
| accurately, across our entire personal computing domain."
|
| https://wonderos.org/
| specialist wrote:
| I now have two reservations (open questions) about Project
| Xanadu.
|
| Centralization
|
| I believe but cannot yet prove that (durable) two-way links
| require some kind of central authority.
|
| I was very slow to appreciate that Nelson always intended for
| Project Xanadu to be centralized (authoritative?). Much like
| Facebook and AOL. Whole onto themselves. Walled gardens.
|
| Being a huge fan of the Xanadu vision (and never understanding
| the tech or stack), I was disappointed with the Web's one-way
| links.
|
| Now I see that we dodged a bullet. A suspect that an "open" Web
| and two-way links are mutually incompatible.
|
| Tumblers
|
| I've always wanted the transclusion feature. But I never fully
| grokked tumbers, Xanadu's fundamental data structure. I'd done a
| bit of work with SNMP MIB, which uses OIDs. Honestly, they
| sucked. But I couldn't think of anything better.
|
| Now I suspect the tumbler approach has been mooted by the
| advances in version control systems.
|
| I still want something like purple numbers or xpointers. Some
| kind of "light weight" tumbler. Not to say the tumbler data
| structure is itself heavy; just the over reliance on tumblers. So
| something like tumblers, as needed, when they're a value-add. So
| intra-document tumblers, not inter-document (eg directory,
| catalog). And definitely not for document management (workflows,
| version control).
|
| --
|
| Thanks for reading. I write to understand. (And Xanadu is
| something I've struggled to understand for decades.) Feedback
| appreciated.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Central authority is probably necessary if it is an authority
| on _the final word_. But I don 't think that's as important as
| it sounds: what's really important is authority on _the first
| word_.
|
| A distributed system could use a web of trust where each user
| claims to be the _originator_ of their work, via PGP signature.
| At that point "authority" is determined by what user
| identities you consider trustworthy by including them in your
| web of trust.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Xanadu transclusion would not work without central authorities
| either. Under current copyright law a web page with
| instructions that say "paste chapter 2, paragraph 33 of someone
| else's book here" is not automatically legal. It may be
| construed as a derivative work.
|
| Ted wanted to have copyright licensing and retrieval costs
| squared away so that when you opened an article with a quote
| from a book in it, you bought the article, you bought just the
| quote part of the book, something stitched them together into a
| document you could see, and everyone involved signed away their
| right to object to such an arrangement.
|
| I suspect the reason why Xanadu wants tumblers is purely
| because organizing the entire world's knowledge into a single
| hierarchical number line looks mathematically neat, even though
| "give me everything in between page 63 of Snow Crash to page 4
| of The Lord of The Rings" is not a meaningful question that can
| be answered. And again, requires a central authority to number
| catalogs and books so that they can be referenced in this
| absolutely batshit insane way.
|
| IMHO the biggest problem with Xanadu isn't the technical
| underpinnings, or the disregard for decentralization. It's the
| UX design, or lack thereof. Having 10 different documents open
| with a bunch of transclusions and links drawn between them is
| at best extremely distracting and at worst not at all usable.
| There's a reason why "spiderweb of documents tied with red
| string" is a visual shorthand for conspiracy theories. And,
| again, all that requires a central authority to be putting in
| the work of tying red string in between all the documents,
| because nobody actually bothers doing that when writing
| documents unless threatened with academic or legal sanctions.
| viksit wrote:
| surprisingly mobile wasn't mentioned here. one of the biggest
| changes has been the shrinking of screen space along with higher
| resolutions.
|
| old paradigms don't factor that in and thus continue to remain
| only of academic importance.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| HyperTIES was a hypermedia system designed by Ben Shneiderman at
| the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.
|
| HyperTIES was certainly inspire by Ted's ideas, but a totally
| different design and focus on usability and easy browsing and
| authoring, and also (with the NeWS version) runtime extensibility
| and scriptability.
|
| Every HyperTIES article had a short definition summarizing its
| contents, and single clicking on a link would show that
| definition at the bottom of the screen without leaving the
| current context. Double clicking followed the link, and a
| stroking gesture left or right with a pie menu would open the
| link up in different windows.
|
| I've written about it before and transcluded the discussion and
| links into this "HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News":
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
|
| >I linked to a brilliant video by Ted Nelson about his life's
| work, and transcribed his most important points (it took him a
| lifetime to know what to say on the video, so it was well worth
| my time transcribing what he had to say, to save other people
| their own time), and then I went onto writing about how HyperTIES
| applied those ideas, and added concepts like pie menus,
| definition previews (sorely missing from the web: a way to read
| the definition of a link destination without actually following
| the link and losing your context), applets, emacs based
| authoring, etc.
|
| >It's ironic that the web is still so primitive that I had to
| perform a lot of transclusion myself by hand in order to explain
| the idea of Transclusion that has been around so long, which Ted
| Nelson has always thought should be built in and automatic, not
| something you have to do laboriously by hand.
|
| Here's a video of HyperTIES and pie menus on NeWS:
|
| Ben Shneiderman shows the Hubble Space Telescope demo on a Sun
| Workstation running NeWS:
|
| https://youtu.be/1uyO-xUTt6Y?t=760
|
| HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM
|
| Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation,
| running the NEWS operating system.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Maybe worth mentioning that Obsidian has transclusion and hover
| previews (and bidirectional links), with intuitive UX; I use
| these features every day. Granted, the indexed content is
| mostly just the static files on my local filesystem....
| pr337h4m wrote:
| "If we wanted to dial up the Xanadu-esque visibility, we could
| work on showing previews of the whole page and directing people
| to specific pieces of text within it."
|
| It has been possible to link to specific pieces of text for a
| while now. For example: https://maggieappleton.com/xanadu-
| patterns#:~:text=If%20we%2....
| [deleted]
| mikewarot wrote:
| We could also link directly to an office in a building by
| putting a ladder up to the window of a given office, but doing
| that completely ignores the structure of the building.
|
| If the text changes, the link breaks.
|
| If the server goes away, the link breaks.
|
| When you click the link, you no longer see the prior page, your
| context breaks.
|
| This is all about persistently enabling side by side viewing.
| ta988 wrote:
| If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing.
| That sound like a really hard problem to handle if you are
| not in control of both sides.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing
|
| If the literal text changes, and the link to the specific
| piece of text breaks because the link is just the words.
| But what if the change to the text is fixing a typo, or
| changing 'he' to 'they'? Nelson's vision was not about
| linking to text, it was about linking ideas. See
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800197.806036
| iamwil wrote:
| Does Maggie only write her essays as a draft to know if it's
| worth finishing based on feedback and view counts?
| cratermoon wrote:
| She does something that can happen in a medium entirely unlike
| the printed word: she publishes what she has, marks it
| according to what state its in.
|
| https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Interesting piece - I hope it gets finished.
|
| Ted Nelson's books _Computer Lib / Dream Machines_, and _Literary
| Machines_ are interesting and unconventional, but hard to find
| now.
|
| As for Xanadu, the classic Wired aricle _The Curse of Xanadu_ [1]
| is still well worth a read. I 'm not sure his vision was
| something that would have ever succeeded, but he at least posited
| an alternative to what we have now.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
|
| Edit to add that I've used the term "rabid prototyping" a few
| times over the years, and skimming that wired article reminds me
| where I stole it from.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The fact that he coined the term hypertext and we saw a far
| less powerful version than he envisioned released by someone
| else does make me feel like there may be some unrealized
| potential, but that's just naive speculation. Im not actually
| familiar with Xanadu.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| The game "Kentucky Route Zero" has a chapter where you're in a
| cave with some crazy cave people doing computer research with
| antiquated hardware and it's called "Xanadu" lol. It took me
| awhile to catch the real world reference.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| Nelson has termed _The Curse of Xanadu_ a hatchet job. There is
| discussion of that article, including links to archived
| versions of Nelson 's responses to it at the c2.com page about
| it [1].
|
| After an initial period of thinking Xanadu was vapourware, then
| feeling like the article was an uncharitable hatchet-job, I'm
| back to thinking it was vapourware. Nelson's responses seemed
| nit-picky at best, and when I downloaded the prototype/demo
| they'd made available I simply could not get it to work.
|
| [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu
| kristopolous wrote:
| I was personally building that demo and expressed these
| concerns at the time ten years ago. The other person on the
| project, who was like 17, convinced Ted that my, at the time,
| 20 years of software development somehow made me malicious
| and he asked me to not work on it.
|
| So he got what some sniping high school kid can make.
|
| Yes I'm still bitter about it. I don't make broken shit and
| that shit was broken. I still went to the demo/announcement
| at Chapman university (Woz was there, that was pretty cool)
|
| The reason Nelson's stuff hasn't gone anywhere is because
| he's a tyrant persuaded by fools and liars. I wish him the
| best regardless.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > somehow made me malicious and he asked me to not work on
| it.
|
| Something like what you describe happened to me. Not a fun
| gig, I sympathize.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Well that sounds like a major red flag
| kristopolous wrote:
| This isn't for lack of competent people with good
| intentions.
|
| The only times his ideas succeeded is when he wasn't on
| the project. Hypercard, WWW... His ideas were in the room
| but he was not.
|
| There's some deep lessons on how important therapy,
| interpersonal relationships and good management are
| there.
|
| This isn't to throw shade. Nobody remembers most
| brilliant inventors as successful CEOs because they
| usually aren't. It's a different skillset and you gotta
| know when to hand over the keys and to whom.
|
| It's not easy and I certainly don't profess expertise.
| specialist wrote:
| FWIW, Duff Kurland's post-mortem of Nelson & Xanadu at
| Autodesk jives with your analysis.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| In the spirit of xanadu, would you mind posting a link?
|
| In searching your keywords, I did come across a font of
| wisdom in the form of "The Autodesk File: Bits of
| History, Words of Experience" which contains some
| chapters on Xanadu and Autodesk's relationship and
| acquisition - which I've managed to be wholly unaware of
| despite being a xanadu enthusiast (in so far as buying a
| couple of Ted's books and watching his videos on youtube
| counts :)
|
| http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig
| _au... (see ToC, Xanadu on page 416 and elsewhere)
| [deleted]
| teddyh wrote:
| Be sure not to miss the footnote on page 418:
|
| 'Come 1992, the "resources of Autodesk" were still
| funding "talent of the Xanadu team" which had not, as of
| that date, produced anything remotely like a production
| prototype--in fact, nothing as impressive as the 88.1x
| prototype which existed before Autodesk invested in
| Xanadu. On August 21, 1992 Autodesk decided to pull the
| plug and give its interest in Xanadu back to the
| Xanadudes.'
| kristopolous wrote:
| I think 10 years on that part of the problem is the
| negative patterns that come with being overly committed
| and passionate to your own ideas.
|
| You need these people to be audacious and relentless in
| order to move the ball forward, like say, Richard
| Stallman. But then you get people that are overly
| audacious and relentless like say Richard Stallman.
|
| The balance here is to know when to put your foot down
| and when to take a backseat.
|
| I've got no answers on how to strike that balance. After
| meeting and listening to John Warnock of Adobe and
| PostScript earlier this year, I'm convinced that Steve
| Jobs didn't know how the first time at Apple but then
| figured out the second.
|
| I also get the feeling that Bezos and Gates learned this
| the hard way. (Guess where http://relentless.com will
| take you...)
|
| I don't know if there's an easy way to learn it. If
| anything I'm way too passive.
| specialist wrote:
| It was a personal conversation. No link, sorry.
|
| From memory, Kurland related that the Xanadu team did one
| or more complete rewrites, couldn't or wouldn't commit to
| releasing something (delays), and Autodesk finally lost
| faith/patience.
|
| Kurland's a great guy. He didn't name names or dog their
| effort. He was mostly disappointed, because he had also
| believed in the promise of Xanadu. But that's just my
| take.
| nateabele wrote:
| For whatever it's worth to you, I don't think of myself as
| easily impressed. I saw Ted give that demo at a small
| conference around 10 years ago. I was impressed.
|
| Whatever part you played in that, well done, and thank you.
|
| I got to speak with him briefly afterwards, and to say that
| he had a chip on his shoulder would be putting it too
| strongly, but there was definitely some kind of an 'edge'
| there.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It was fine. There's a number of related projects that
| are all incredibly minor who had similar demos and
| somehow were also managed by similar personality types.
| I've worked with many people over the years but somehow
| they get their own special group.
|
| Sometimes you run into them at SigGraph, they're these
| emperors where their kingdom is their mind. They have
| those messy sprawling websites that read like Doc Brown's
| scrapbook.
|
| It's an archetype I feel certainly adjacent to and
| fearful of.
|
| Regardless, about 6 months ago I left my job trying to
| catch up on all the AI craze because I think that might
| be the missing piece in moving this class of projects to
| the next step.
|
| It's going slowly, motivation is hard and this is still
| kind of a moonshot.
|
| The information organization required to make these memex
| inspired thought navigational systems truly useful was
| fleeting, subjective, and labor intensive. AI can do
| that, pretty well actually, and in personal, subjective
| ways.
|
| VR and AR can as well and I explored that enough to
| conclude it's too complicated. You can certainly express
| the dimensionality needed and tune things accordingly but
| it's too complicated to be useful.
|
| There's a cognitive limit on the amount of dimensionality
| and complexity that most people can handle.
|
| There are certainly some brilliant people who don't seem
| bound by these limits but that's not the point here. It's
| about taking the information that usually only brilliant
| people have access to and expanding that so that merely
| average people like myself can gain competence in it as
| well.
|
| Chat bots are fine but that's not going to get you from 0
| to say, abstract algebras, modern quantum physics, or
| field theory, which I strongly believe should be
| accessible to say, 40-60% of people motivated enough to
| learn it and I strongly believe it currently is not
| because of the cognitive limits I expressed above by the
| traditional linear instruction methods.
|
| Getting to the next paradigm is something more people
| should be working on
|
| Turning the Internet into a true learning machine needs
| more work and hopefully AI can help
| specialist wrote:
| > _Yes I 'm still bitter about it._
|
| It's hard not to be. Been there, been done like that.
|
| Sadly, I have all the financial and business sense of some
| zooplankton. I'd give a leg to go back in time for a do-
| over and the other leg to be smart like that.
| predictsoft wrote:
| Loads of Ted stuff at
| https://archive.org/details/tednelsonarchive?page=2&sort=-we...
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(page generated 2023-08-20 23:01 UTC)