* <> Ted's Ahead of You Created: 11/14/2017, 8:21:07 PM It's funny: you can be a true believer, like me – a real Xaniac – and you can think to yourself, hey, I GET it; I'm not like all these other turds-for-brains computer people who don't GET Xanadu. I understand Ted's ideas. I'm one of the enlightened people! And then you talk to Ted, or you read something he wrote twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, and ...you pause ...as in your brain a small iconoclasm is committed, and a space is freed into which another little chunk of The Big Picture fits. You then eat your slice of humble pie, and you think to yourself, ah, well, I get a LOT of it, but I wasn't quite getting that bit, was I? But now I am! It's easy to make excuses for oneself when the tao of understanding has a large unlearning component. I was a youth when I started learning about "hypertext" and "links", and the concepts I gained then were not at all the real thing. They were the shallow simulacra of hypertext and links that the world had consented to accept as real: hypertext is text with links; links are things you click on. Try to scratch below that surface and you'd get more layers of misapprehension: it's chunked text, it's nonlinearity — the great joke of the latter being that in a single-document browser it's ALWAYS linear, always sequential – you just have some control over the sequence. Hypertext isn't just data structures and informatics, it's sensual and experiential. There's motion, there's action – it's cinematic. There's nothing cinematic about a Web browser. Intertextuality, a term that came later, is the essence of Ted's hypertext.You might call it dynamically explicit intertext. -- Excerpted from: PUBLIC NOTES (H) http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-H ©2017 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR)