> Xanadu wasn’t the victim of “Worse is Better”; it was just a solution in search of a problem.
Well, in the day to day use of computers across everyone I interact with, the following problems are very much present and still unsolved (savvy users can address them and transform them into chores; non-savvy users solve some of them by paying money to pospone the issues):
- I don't have any space left on my phone but my laptop has tons of space available. (Addressed by Xanadu principle 13.)
- How do I back up my stuff uniformly across my devices. (Addressed by Xanadu principle 14.)
- How do I share this file with a relative. (Addressed by Xanadu principles 2+4+10+11+12.)
- How do I not get trapped by vendors who want to lock me into their cloud solution. (Addressed by Xanadu principles 1, 2, 3, 15, 17.)
So the problems are very much there, and not improving. If anything, Xanadu was a prescient solution that addressed back them the problems we have today.
There was a commercial networking product which addressed principle 13 as well --- Kerbango? I remember a couple of ads for it, the idea was that adding a computer to a network and installing this would increase available storage space and back up all the other computers running the software on that network, basically a RAID of compleat machines....
The other books on hardware from this timeframe such as Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ or Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ or Andy Hertzfeld's _Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made_ (available as: https://folklore.org/0-index.html) are quite striking and forthright in their discussion of hardware limitations and the ingenuity needed to get things done.
Or, contrast the far more prosaic _Weaving the Web_ by Tim Berners-Lee and esp. take note of compromises such as URL changing from Universal Resource Locator to Uniform Resource Locator.
If git's pack index gets refactored slightly, it can do anything from trigram-indexed search to metadata indexing to hyperlinking both ways across repos. That is actually useful, I use it: https://replicated.live/blog/wiki
It's not a bad UI metaphor for limited applications, but it makes no sense at all for a global document store.
Humans like boundaries. Even ignoring the copyright issues, we like our cultural artefacts to have edges and a limited number of interaction modes - basically read/consume, write/publish, mention/reference, and converse/comment.
Massively cross-linked semantic soup isn't one of those modes. Text artefacts need to be stable - it's a core requirement - or at least mutable in very, limited and controlled ways.
Music has sampling and LLMs have style transfer, but text with mutable semantics is a weird animal and not really how we do things.
I am not in the contract negotiation business, but I had that experience.
Speaking of git-with-permalinks, it implies that you have some repos locally that may want to link to each other. Like your code in 4 different repos, one repo with tickets, one wiki, and some other stuff.
It is especially helpful if agents leave cross-references to have some trail for the decisions. Agents, generally speaking, have no memory, so each time they recover the context from scratch. When I read what they coded, I essentially do the same.
So, permalinks and transclusion are practically useful. T.H.Nelson picked up that idea in the movie industry, I hear. They furiously edit their scripts and contracts, I suppose.
I agree that transclusion, particularly based on byte offsets, is not very useful for the WWW. But the concept is much more useful than what the author suggests. Maybe you have heard of Ivar Jacobson's Objectory tool. I worked with it in the nineties in large projects and it was able to transclude terms and definitions wherever they were linked, even integrated in the text flow where they appeared. That was true added value and much more useful than tools like DOORS. I myself have implemented CrossLine, which I used for large project information aggregation, creating new documents with transcluded passages from specifications and minutes put into the most useful context. In CrossLine, the unit of transclusion is an outline item. Also Jacobson's tool had useful units. I think the failure of approaches like Xanadu was not an absence of meaningful transclusion use-cases; rather to identify and integrate the right units of knowledge.
This was an amazing read. I try to make hyper-documents as Nelson wanted and I have seen much of the contradictions. Yet I still believe you have to give people a hundred ideas for them to use 10. He did just that.
I first read about Xanadu very early in my life, and this project is an absolute miracle in terms of how much it can hold my interest for something that could not and never would work.
The crazy irritating zig-zagging split document view has always struck me as a demo that would be rounded off after "initial release", because it's still a useful feature underneath the stupid viewer-friendly UI. Anyone who has ever reviewed a Git PR or negotiated a contract has already had to do what Xanadu was built to do. It's just that lawyers and programmers invented user interfaces that actually make sense for that, while the Xanadu version is hyper-optimized for the worst possible case.
Still, it is reasonable to assume that once people start writing documents "Xanalogically" - i.e. online, in the way of a Wikipedia article - that there would be a need for a viewable history of one's edits, and that someone might want to reply to a document with inline commentary. It's really everything else that didn't make it into WorldWideWeb or WikiWikiWeb that makes my head spin.
Like, how could two-way links work? I mean, they can't, obviously? Links go around text, so they have to live on a document. The author here mentions spam, but there's a far simpler structural problem that making links two-way means the links have to be stored... say it with me folks, as a stream of annotations on top of the underlying text! Links would go "on top of" your document, linking word 153 of paragraph 4 of document A onto word 96 of paragraph 13 of document B.
But what happens if document B changes? Then it's going to have invalid backlinks! Well, it does work, because in Xanadu... all the documents you write would be transclusions of a "permascroll". Everything you ever write goes in the permascroll and then your Xanadu client would transparently publish a transclusion of your edited document. So "word 96 of paragraph 13 of document B" somehow gains actual referential integrity across changes to the document.
It is the most NLE-ass idea ever, and I didn't make the connection to video editing until you mentioned Ted having Hollywood ambitions. Because basically every video editing tool on a computer ever is extremely Xanalogical. In a Hollywood shoot or a TV show, you basically keep your cameras rolling throughout the shoot, you mark off your shots with a clap board, and then the editor assembles an actual timeline from the source footage. During this process everything is nondestructively transcluded right up until the final export[2].
But, even then, there is no way in hell I could go and transclude someone else's movie straight from their source footage and make a commentary on it. Like, not even in today's environment of YouTube video essays longer than the films they're talking about. It just wouldn't be possible, not for technical reasons but legal ones.
If Ted had actually made it into Hollywood, he would have learned that every reuse of one's work needs to be individually negotiated by a team of lawyers, no matter how petty the use, because all the suits running Hollywood are Valentian rapists[1] (if not actual rapists) who will take advantage of you the moment you provide any leeway. Anyone who doesn't understand this gets taken advantage of until they burn out or fight back. There is no world in which copyright is respected but I'm also allowed to publish a book containing half of your book without your permission. The law saying you're not allowed to do this is older than the US Civil War and decided in a court case[0] that singlehandedly turned copyright from a straightforward inquiry into an insanely fact-intensive question that never gets resolved.
Of course, this was supposed to have been pre-negotiated, which almost makes sense if Xanadu was just weird futuristic Lexis-Nexus, but Ted Nelson also wanted this thing to be an open standard. This would have made piracy extremely straightforward! And I think that's what makes Xanadu so interesting. It's trying to do literally everything and spending comical amounts of effort at it, inventing insane things like Enfilades and tumbler numbers[3], all to fall flat on its face with nothing to show for it.
[2] Of course, in 1960 NLEs didn't exist. Film (and video) was edited destructively with actual scissors and splices.
[3] I legitimately thought tumblr was named after these things for like years but it turns out, no, it's named after a "tumblelog" which is basically proto-Twitter.
Well, he had to have at least some passing knowledge of the film industry. From Wikipedia: "Nelson is the son of Emmy Award–winning director Ralph Nelson and Academy Award – winning actress Celeste Holm."
Your musing about 2-way links reminded me of the short-lived "webhooks for backlinks" trend, which didn't last long before spammers found and abused it.
The idea was that you had a well-known webhook location, and when people linked to your blog post, they'd ping your webhook with their URL, and you'd display it under your blog post as a "backlink".
If that's obviously a way to inject marketing spam you'd be right, but I swear this stuff got quite popular before being overran.
Unfortunately google is now so bad, it's impossible to find genuine history of the phenomena I'm describing, so I just have to trust my memory that I'm not inventing a past that didn't exist.
The world is too mutable for it to exist as a decentralized system, you can set up all these permascrolls and enfilades and tumblers and stuff. But someone is going to see profit in making two-way links one-way or altering the permanent record, so they will. Not to mention what happens just by entropy, servers will get turned off because companies go under or people lose interest. You could make it everybody's problem with something like IPFS, you still would have to solve spammers exploiting the commons.
And it only makes sense for a place where documents are approximately equally popular. If the canonical Harry Potter contained links to all places referring or citing it, it would be one overloaded document.
And then the whole micropayments thing would make it a non-starter, since that have failed badly just about every time it has been tried.
Also not to be confused with the 1980 film starring Olivia Newton-John with a great soundtrack by her, Electric Light Orchestra, The Tubes, and Cliff Richard.
Well, in the day to day use of computers across everyone I interact with, the following problems are very much present and still unsolved (savvy users can address them and transform them into chores; non-savvy users solve some of them by paying money to pospone the issues):
- I don't have any space left on my phone but my laptop has tons of space available. (Addressed by Xanadu principle 13.)
- How do I back up my stuff uniformly across my devices. (Addressed by Xanadu principle 14.)
- How do I share this file with a relative. (Addressed by Xanadu principles 2+4+10+11+12.)
- How do I not get trapped by vendors who want to lock me into their cloud solution. (Addressed by Xanadu principles 1, 2, 3, 15, 17.)
So the problems are very much there, and not improving. If anything, Xanadu was a prescient solution that addressed back them the problems we have today.
The book _CAD History_, available on-line at: https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/introduction has a bit on Xanadu from the Autodesk end of things.
Or, contrast the far more prosaic _Weaving the Web_ by Tim Berners-Lee and esp. take note of compromises such as URL changing from Universal Resource Locator to Uniform Resource Locator.
Also, permalinks can work on top of git quite nicely https://replicated.live/blog/link
If git's pack index gets refactored slightly, it can do anything from trigram-indexed search to metadata indexing to hyperlinking both ways across repos. That is actually useful, I use it: https://replicated.live/blog/wiki
CRDT merges are a very incremental and useful upgrade for git https://replicated.live/blog/meta
Xanadu-like functionality is perfectly within reach.
We don't get what we want or what we need. Instead, we move erratically in very small, easy, local steps.
It's not a bad UI metaphor for limited applications, but it makes no sense at all for a global document store.
Humans like boundaries. Even ignoring the copyright issues, we like our cultural artefacts to have edges and a limited number of interaction modes - basically read/consume, write/publish, mention/reference, and converse/comment.
Massively cross-linked semantic soup isn't one of those modes. Text artefacts need to be stable - it's a core requirement - or at least mutable in very, limited and controlled ways.
Music has sampling and LLMs have style transfer, but text with mutable semantics is a weird animal and not really how we do things.
Speaking of git-with-permalinks, it implies that you have some repos locally that may want to link to each other. Like your code in 4 different repos, one repo with tickets, one wiki, and some other stuff.
It is especially helpful if agents leave cross-references to have some trail for the decisions. Agents, generally speaking, have no memory, so each time they recover the context from scratch. When I read what they coded, I essentially do the same.
So, permalinks and transclusion are practically useful. T.H.Nelson picked up that idea in the movie industry, I hear. They furiously edit their scripts and contracts, I suppose.
The crazy irritating zig-zagging split document view has always struck me as a demo that would be rounded off after "initial release", because it's still a useful feature underneath the stupid viewer-friendly UI. Anyone who has ever reviewed a Git PR or negotiated a contract has already had to do what Xanadu was built to do. It's just that lawyers and programmers invented user interfaces that actually make sense for that, while the Xanadu version is hyper-optimized for the worst possible case.
Still, it is reasonable to assume that once people start writing documents "Xanalogically" - i.e. online, in the way of a Wikipedia article - that there would be a need for a viewable history of one's edits, and that someone might want to reply to a document with inline commentary. It's really everything else that didn't make it into WorldWideWeb or WikiWikiWeb that makes my head spin.
Like, how could two-way links work? I mean, they can't, obviously? Links go around text, so they have to live on a document. The author here mentions spam, but there's a far simpler structural problem that making links two-way means the links have to be stored... say it with me folks, as a stream of annotations on top of the underlying text! Links would go "on top of" your document, linking word 153 of paragraph 4 of document A onto word 96 of paragraph 13 of document B.
But what happens if document B changes? Then it's going to have invalid backlinks! Well, it does work, because in Xanadu... all the documents you write would be transclusions of a "permascroll". Everything you ever write goes in the permascroll and then your Xanadu client would transparently publish a transclusion of your edited document. So "word 96 of paragraph 13 of document B" somehow gains actual referential integrity across changes to the document.
It is the most NLE-ass idea ever, and I didn't make the connection to video editing until you mentioned Ted having Hollywood ambitions. Because basically every video editing tool on a computer ever is extremely Xanalogical. In a Hollywood shoot or a TV show, you basically keep your cameras rolling throughout the shoot, you mark off your shots with a clap board, and then the editor assembles an actual timeline from the source footage. During this process everything is nondestructively transcluded right up until the final export[2].
But, even then, there is no way in hell I could go and transclude someone else's movie straight from their source footage and make a commentary on it. Like, not even in today's environment of YouTube video essays longer than the films they're talking about. It just wouldn't be possible, not for technical reasons but legal ones.
If Ted had actually made it into Hollywood, he would have learned that every reuse of one's work needs to be individually negotiated by a team of lawyers, no matter how petty the use, because all the suits running Hollywood are Valentian rapists[1] (if not actual rapists) who will take advantage of you the moment you provide any leeway. Anyone who doesn't understand this gets taken advantage of until they burn out or fight back. There is no world in which copyright is respected but I'm also allowed to publish a book containing half of your book without your permission. The law saying you're not allowed to do this is older than the US Civil War and decided in a court case[0] that singlehandedly turned copyright from a straightforward inquiry into an insanely fact-intensive question that never gets resolved.
Of course, this was supposed to have been pre-negotiated, which almost makes sense if Xanadu was just weird futuristic Lexis-Nexus, but Ted Nelson also wanted this thing to be an open standard. This would have made piracy extremely straightforward! And I think that's what makes Xanadu so interesting. It's trying to do literally everything and spending comical amounts of effort at it, inventing insane things like Enfilades and tumbler numbers[3], all to fall flat on its face with nothing to show for it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folsom_v._Marsh
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Valenti#Valenti_on_new_te...
[2] Of course, in 1960 NLEs didn't exist. Film (and video) was edited destructively with actual scissors and splices.
[3] I legitimately thought tumblr was named after these things for like years but it turns out, no, it's named after a "tumblelog" which is basically proto-Twitter.
Well, he had to have at least some passing knowledge of the film industry. From Wikipedia: "Nelson is the son of Emmy Award–winning director Ralph Nelson and Academy Award – winning actress Celeste Holm."
The idea was that you had a well-known webhook location, and when people linked to your blog post, they'd ping your webhook with their URL, and you'd display it under your blog post as a "backlink".
If that's obviously a way to inject marketing spam you'd be right, but I swear this stuff got quite popular before being overran.
Unfortunately google is now so bad, it's impossible to find genuine history of the phenomena I'm describing, so I just have to trust my memory that I'm not inventing a past that didn't exist.
And it only makes sense for a place where documents are approximately equally popular. If the canonical Harry Potter contained links to all places referring or citing it, it would be one overloaded document.
And then the whole micropayments thing would make it a non-starter, since that have failed badly just about every time it has been tried.