Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide
hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes,
and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all
information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to
eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings.
And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes
are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures,
Xanadu was supposed to save the world.
Time Cube is a site by Gene Ray, the self-proclaimed "wisest human". For some reason he thinks the way we should be thinking about the day-cycle is to imagine a cube around the earth, with one edge above daybreak, noon, nightfall, and midnight, for "four simultaneous twenty-four hour days". (He uses the term 'corner' instead of edge.)
If you don't get why this is a fundamental breakthrough and the only way to look at the world, he will call you "educated stupid" and a dupe in an ongoing conspiracy theory featuring the usual villains of the Western world, especially academia and religion (and Wikipedia, which will have very little of him). For instance, something about the opposites-in-balance philosophy attached to the "time cube" representation is asserted to be fundamentally incompatible with monotheism. Anyway, ranting about this comprises the bulk of his site(s). That and racial-conflict armageddon if you make your way onto later pages.
So - a pretty normal crank after a certain point, but in some ways his website it's sort of THE canonical crank website because of its spectacularly rant-y incoherence and awesome web design.
I don't think I've ever seen someone try (or succeed) at explaining What The Actual ... is Time Cube. You seem to have done it in a paragraph and a half.
>the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures
Hm. The tone suggests that this is narrow-minded, but I really do think this (I also think that while Xanadu is flawed, it is on the right track). What about this observation is "hackerish" and is it known to be deficient in some way?
The idea that all disagreements arise from ignorance, stupidity, and communications is a point of view that privileges the speaker/thinker, because those concepts cannot always be defined in an objective, repeatable way. So it allows the speaker/thinker to think "I know more, or am smarter, or are a better communicator," rather than "this other person disagrees with me."
Take abortion, for example. Some people believe that human life begins at conception, thus abortion is murder and should be prevented by the government. Others believe that the government should privilege the rights of the mother over the fetus until birth. While these points of view are informed by scientific knowledge, they are not based wholly on scientific knowledge; they are system of human values. So no matter how well we understand the biological systems of procreation, there will likely always be disagreement over abortion.
Or consider people who believe that if they follow the precepts of their particular religion, they will be rewarded supernaturally after death. While there is no scientific knowledge to support that point of view, there's also no scientific knowledge that disproves it either. So if some people think that eating pork is ok, and others think it is a sin, there's not much science (or any other system of objective knowledge) can do to resolve that situation.
He should have followed the "release early and often" mantra and released a version every decade, and then iterated based on user feedback.
Instead, by waiting an entire 40 years, the beta seems to have some obvious usability issues that a more frequent once-per-decade release schedule would have caught early on.
There was a release in 1993, a complete open source release of all code developed during the 80s at autodesk in 1999, a release around 2003, a windows demo in 2007, and this latest release. There were some intellectual-property-related delays, mostly related to either unfiled patents (wherein the ideas were under trade secret protection until the patent applications were filed) or due to the difficulty of convincing all developers involved to agree to a release.
Having too many developers and not getting them to agree to a license or design beforehand bit him in the ass several times.
This is actually a rather neat visualization. If you open the demo and wait (and wait) you'll eventually get a document that's assembled from different texts. Hold down the space bar and press up/down to scroll through it. Each time you scroll, you land on another segment. If it's a segment from the left, press space+left to shift over to it. Likewise, space+right to go to the right. Mouse scroll also works for smaller increments, and you can also click on the parallel documents.
Other than the visualization, I'm unsure how much it really accomplishes. The recent submission, the Leo editor [1], follows a similar premise but for a much more interesting result: to generate python code. Leo is also an IDE; this is appears to just be a renderer.
Thanks for the help-text -- and the heads up about leo being (recently) posted here. I remember having a look some 10? years ago, nice to see it's still alive!
Would it be possible to re-cast all of the wikipedia content into a xanadoc? It's the closest we have to a huge body of text with full history attached on a wide variety of subjects and two-way links internally. That way you can side-step the problem of doing this for the whole web in one go.
It's a pity they haven't open-sourced it, in my opinion the only thing that will ever rescue project Xanadu is if it gets a lot more people working on it.
In some parallel universe there is another version of me writing this on a Hurd powered computer using Xanaweb about Tim Berners-Lee's pet project and musing about what it would be like if Linux had succeeded.
> Would it be possible to re-cast all of the wikipedia content into a xanadoc?
Currently, no, because Wikipedia is multimedia and Xanadu, while it has aspirations in that direction, can only handle text (and, it seems, only linear, unstructured text, and that limitation against structure seems fundamental and deliberate, unlike the absence of multimedia support.)
The least they could do is grab a handful of entries and xanadoc it up. Right now it's completely unrelatable to me. Further it's all religious ramblings that I care nothing about.
Ted Nelson is a fundamental figure of early computing (despite not being a computer scientist himself). His work (recommended: Dream Machines/Computer Lib, 1974; Literary Machines, 1981; Geeks Bearing Gifts, 2008) is about how computers touch us as humans, and how they affect our future, especially when it comes to communicating and using them to spread+build knowledge and ideas. When Nelson wrote his first essays, very few people had the insight or knowledge to really understand what he was going on about. Nelson came from a movie acting/storywriting/literary background, and this allowed him to establish parallels and formulate ideas that no one at the time could have done. I would argue that even today, some of his finer points still hold deep relevance and are yet unknown from the general computing crowd.
Ted Nelson remains a fairly unknown figure in computing, partly because he never wrote much code/developed products/worked in traditional research groups himself (a major misstep in a field where you tend to be mostly recognized for the projects you ship or papers you publish), and because a lot of his ideas were replaced by ideas that are much more simple to implement and make viable. A lot of hackers do like to ridicule him for those reasons, which I think is a mistake - despite those shortcomings, his body of work is still full of ideas and theories that you won't find anywhere else. You can almost see a second, parallel path that computing could have taken in the 70s. (Nelson was respected by many more famous computer scientists, including for example Alan Kay)
That's where Xanadu comes in: Xanadu is an implementation for Nelson's vision for hypertext (which predates the hypertext we know by more than a decade or so). His hypertext is much deeper than Berners-Lee's: notably, it is based on 2-way links (so not only can a page link to other pages, but you can also see which pages link to that page), a deep version system (so that you can access past versions of webpages), stronger "linking" (no such thing as "broken links" in Xanadu), etc. Of course one can see why this is much harder to implement at scale than the web we have now. Nonetheless, Nelson has been working on it through the years, as evidenced by this release.
PS: if you do start searching the web for material about Ted Nelson, do not start with the Wired article about him from a decade or so ago. It is terrible. I quite like his YouTube videos, but they require to be familiar with his work (or at least his rhetoric style) already. I think "Geeks Bearing Gifts" is the best foray into Nelson's style - and it is short enough that one can read it quickly. Then, if you want to really get into the meat of his stuff, dive into his other books.
The real problem with Xanadu is that it's based on a fundamentally flawed concept -- knowable provenance. The problem is one of having an overly literal and simplistic view of what a document is (indeed, this problem is embedded in the announcement page itself). Such and such is linked to THE ORIGINAL sourcedoc. The problem is that with almost any significant document provenance is ambiguous and unknowable, which turns anything of significance into an amiguous mare's nest of noise links.
Take for a simple example "Macbeth". We don't have the "original", we don't know for certain which version derives from which version, and we don't know for certain who is the source of any given change. Yet Nelson uses a shakespeare play as one of his examples blithely ignoring the problem of provenance throughout. Now imagine a really thorny issue like the Bible or a particle physics paper.
Imagine if every document in the world were created and maintained using the same bug free version of word with change tracking on. Any quotations or abstractions were carefully done using OLE embedding. No-one ever misquoted someone else from memory, or accidentally deleted a file and then typed it back in from an old print out. And all the edits acted as links. Ok it still wouldn't work. Welcome to xanadu.
Comparing the web unfavorably to xanadu is like DOS fans decrying the mac because they could do so much more from the command line, except that DOS actually worked at the time the Mac came out.
It doesn't have to be the original. In most of his writing, the refs have been content-addressed (hash). It's fascinating to see him backpedal to location-based addressing (URL) here, given the extent to which he's railed against that concept in the past. I would have imagined at least a hashsum retained as a field in the xanadoc file.
I've read a fair amount of his stuff but hadn't seen him talk about hash-based addressing, do you know where you've seen it? In Literary Machines he wrote about a hierarchical addressing scheme called Tumblers:
I was under the impression that the point of transclusion is to ensure no actual copying occurs -- that every quotation or paraphrasing of a prior work is explicitly connected to to the prior work, ensuring the "truth" of the quotation and the connection to its own foundations.
If this doesn't point to a single version of something, if the provenance of the source isn't provable, I'm not sure I understand the point of the strong source linking. Unless I'm misunderstanding your comment.
Also, I think that HTTP got it right when encoding is returned with the document (rather than specified in the link), but if you've already made the mistake of dealing with byte offsets you're tied to a particular representation.
Macbeth isn't under copyright. As far as I've understood most of the point with Xanadu wrt [ed:provenance], is that it is concerned with authors being able to claim ownership in order to stimulate new writing in the age of zero-cost copying.
In my personal opinion, in some sense, if no-one ever got paid (again) for any work that has already been published -- that might very well have a positive effect on new creations -- if all those new creations were free to decide on price/availability.
Whoops, thank you. Not sure how I managed that when the parent comment used the correct word.
On a side note, the examples from that text is a little strange, as providence also can mean "the prudence and care exercised by someone in the management of resources [ant: {improvidence}, {shortsightedness}]".
So, while I think the example is indeed wrong, there appear to actually be a correct reading for the use of providence in this case (there's no long term plan made to take into account the implication of the well logs)?
Nelson did have some visionary ideas, but there is an important lesson to be learned here in how to bring visionary ideas into reality (and how not to).
For a deep philosophical lesson, contrast the Xanadu story with Clay Shirky's article on the Web, “In Praise of Evolvable Systems”: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/evolve.htm.... As Shirky says, "had the Web been a strong and well-designed entity from its inception, it would have gone nowhere”--as Xanadu was and did.
The talk that Ted gave at the Homebrew Computer Club's 38th Anniversary Reunion was what really helped me understand his vision. That talk is online here: http://youtu.be/S84vl5759Ec?t=5m37s
One bit of evidence of his influence on a bunch of other people is the spread of various terms he coined: hypertext, hypermedia, transclusion, teledildonics. I also like 'intertwingled', though it hasn't caught on as much.
The main issue with the wired article is that it's factually inaccurate. Ted has written a point by point rebuttal to it, which you can find with a cursory search.
This is interesting because its your classic ivory tower (Xanadu) vs the trenches (web) approach. After all these years and all this spilled ink, we finally have an implementation. Ignoring the tinhat style presentation, its um... interesting I guess, but from what I can tell tries to solve a problem that either doesn't need solving or has been solved in a different way by the web and sites like rap genius. Sometimes a "worse" system that's modular can be built upon is better than a "perfect" system that takes decades to launch and is monolithic and inflexible.
Also, this system being blind to things like complex formatting, colors, pictures, videos, etc kinda kills it for the modern user. It really does have this sad sheen to it, like some intelligent people worked real hard on something yet they didn't have the social vision to really ask if this works for the everyman or what problem they were solving for others. Its an Asperger's masterpiece of sorts.
"Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
The spacebar is our control key.
spacebar + up-arrow or down-arrow: NEXT SEGMENT
spacebar + left-arrow or right-arrow:
- step onto bridge, see sourcedoc and xanadoc side by side
This plus the fact that the proof-of-concept of a thing 40 years in the making doesn't work without Javascript is truly insane.
I was all prepared to see something exciting when I clicked on the link, since unlike many of the commenters here I know what Project Xanadu is. So I open the page on my smartphone, scroll down a bit, and: "INSTRUCTIONS: DON'T TOUCH THE MOUSE!"
Ummm... touchscreen device here? As visionary as Ted is, has he failed to forsee touchscreens and design touch-based interactions? Don't get me wrong, I love my keyboard, but I don't always have one anymore.
On a touchscreen-only device, there is no scrollwheel, spacebar, or shift key. That leaves "clicking on any page takes you to it", which I have with the web already. Except with the web I can also pan and zoom to navigate around the page when I get there.
Well, decades later they build this, but the question is, why use it when we have iframes and links among the html elements?
And this:
STRANGE RESTRICTION--
because of Web security rules (a complex maze),
a web page cannot request pages from elsewhere.
So we have to package
all the contents into this first program.
It's called the CORS security model. Maybe someone doesn't want pages to embed their stuff?
It is actually a pretty strange restriction, if you look at it from some distance. I remember back then, when "mashups" were all the craze, I spent a weekend writing a website that parsed another site - forgot what it was actually about - and displayed it in a nice way. It worked perfectly offline, but failed online. That was the first time I heard about the same-origin policy.
The whole web security model grew organically and unplanned. Pages have access to your state and credentials, but are blocked from accessing other domains - but only under certain circumstances (e.g. loading scripts, or sending information is OK, just not "applying" your credentials). Retrospectively, it would have been much more sensible to allow scripts to access arbitrary HTTP (or even socket) addresses, but without sending cookies and credentials along when doing so.
There is just so much awesome stuff you can't build now because of that. Server-less RSS readers, a Wikipedia "shell", legally or politically sensitive mashups/JS apps hosted on some anonymous freehoster, and so on.
I'm tempted to think that the reason for the difference is that Xanadu imagines documents as documents (without any code or code-equivalent to be executed by the browser) and not as part of a web application, and not with HTTP auth or cookies to convey authority to take or invoke actions. The web security model has grown up because of what you can actively do via a web app (authenticated actions), and then because of what web apps can do to each other (cross-site/cross-domain every-random-thing).
In an era where Javascript was rare or nonexistent and where people typically "read" web pages rather than authenticating to them, it didn't seem very dangerous to arbitrarily include resources from one page in another.
It's not clear to me to what extent Xanadu ever considered whether it wanted to be used to build interactive server-based applications with user authentication and authenticated actions, and, if so, whether it ever fleshed out a security model for that.
And imagine that any site could request any document from another site that you're logged into ... I could just steal your bank account info or anything else, by writing a LOLcats site that gives you 15GB of free storage, while silently sending targeted requests to all the banks. Your cookies would be submitted along with those requests and MY SITE would get the info.
Proxies can't send your cookies like the browser can.
No, there are good reasons for these restrictions. Servers should whitelist certain resources and sites. Now there is only this: http://xkcd.com/792/
Well, a script should be able to set of a naked HTTP request to `othersite.com` without sending along the cookies for `othersite.com`. I don't see how that would allow new vulnerabilities.
Basically, make XMLHttpRequest not use any cookies etc. when making requests to other domains.
ugh, I hear ya! I, too, built a handful of wildly-powerful active pages... I was inspired by the decks from Neuromancer... I was able to scrape pages, combine multiple pages, but it all fell apart when I ran into xss...
Xanadu in concept is crazy, a system of documents that aren't just linked via hyperlinks, but where the actual content was linked between different documents. Unfortunately, after many, many times to develop it, it fell on the way-side. It makes this news quite interesting.
Thats's a pretty big niche ... But it pales in comparison to the number of Xanadocs I've been reading lately. On another note, Ted Nelson is one of the characters in The Autodesk Files.
When I try in chrome on OSX, the main document fails to load text. Still, with a little more polish, I could see actually using this (a fully annotated, interactive wikipedia would be a neat demo).
This reminds me of Kenneth Goldsmith's notion of "Uncreative Writing" (In a nutshell: There is enough text out there, don't write anything yourself) From the looks of it, this would be a nice visualisation and way to trace that kind of writing.
So I gather the "visible connections" refers to the lines from the document to the original source. What if I had a document with over 100 sources? Would lines just litter the whole screen? By then, you couldn't tell which line went where. It'd be like untangling messy wires.
I appreciate some of the features included with Xanadu, including 2-way links, transclusions, and versioning. But Ted's always tied it to this interface, which seems poor for reading. Couldn't links to the original source be hidden on command, so I can concentrate on what I'm reading, and not the distracting colors and lines?
So is this basically a sort of more-visual copyscape/turn-it-in system where you can see which parts and how much of a document come from other sources? It's interesting from that perspective, but there's far too much visual noise for it to be the primary document structure of the internet. To simultaneously see every related document to what you're currently reading? Seems like there would be a high cognitive load there.
It only says not to use the mouse at the top. Further down the page you can find the "advanced directions", for people "advanced" enough to use a mouse. (I'm a basic keyboarder myself.)
A very long time ago, I got the Xanadu design document from Ted Nelson. Interesting stuff. I regret discarding it when we moved to a small house in the mountains 15 years ago. I wish I still had it.
I like how they admit to having screwed up by not delivering on linked documents before the web.
I tried using it for about 2 minutes and then closed the tab because it was sluggish. It feels sad because I read about Xanadu and Ted's crazy ideas years ago. Unfortunately that's how things work, my first impression of it now is that it's crap.
I have heard of Ted Nelson and Xanadu over the years. But I really don't understand what I'm looking at. Could someone compare and contrast with a more contemporary effort such as Federated Wiki?
you're looking at quotations and inclusion being transactional links instead of copy/paste. These links possibly involve micropayments. iirc, for Ted Nelson, this had the side effect of solving the copyright problem (for text, I guess) when viewing a document = following all the links to include quotations and other inclusions = micropayments.
Or at least that's what I remember from Literary Machines.
Actually, RapGenius is the realized, "worse is better" version of Xanadu. It takes the simple idea of annotated hypertext and runs with it, and doesn't bother with all this unusual things like panning, backlinks, excerpts, and so on. That's why RapGenius is successful, and Xanadu is still vaporware.
OTOH, I don't think this is even supposed to come out. It's rather a demonstration of some pretty interesting, advanced (and thus also failable) ideas. It reminds me a lot of Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface" ideas.
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html