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Indirect Documents At Last
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Oct 24, 2005 08:33 AM
from the changing-the-base-nature dept.
from the changing-the-base-nature dept.
BarryNorton writes "In a world that increasingly takes the WWW, its pages and the other documents we exchange in the electronic world as given - and knights Tim Berners-Lee without an understanding of the pre-WWW background of stateless client/server document architectures (e.g. Gopher) and hypertext (e.g. Xanadu) on which he built - there still beavers away a forgotten figure, Ted Nelson, eager to more fully achieve the original hypertext vision.
In recent communications Nelson says:
'The tekkies have hijacked literature- with the best intentions, of course!-) - but now the humanists have to get it back.
Nearly every form of electronic document- Word, Acrobat, HTML, XML- represents some business or ideological agenda. Many believe Word and Acrobat are out to entrap users; HTML and XML enact a very limited kind of hypertext with great internal complexity. All imitate paper and (internally) hierarchy.
I propose a different document agenda: I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper. In that case they can be far more powerful, with deep and rich new interconnections and properties- able to quote dynamically from other documents and buckle sideways to other documents, such as comments or successive versions; able to present third-party links; and much more.
Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm, where everything can be freely and legally quoted and remixed in any amount without negotiation.'"
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Trans (complete text) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:5, Informative)
and xanadu.com/trollout.txt
Permission is given to redistribute this but only in its entirety.
Dear World:
The tekkies have hijacked literature- with the best intentions, of
course!-) - but now the humanists have to get it back.
Nearly every form of electronic document- Word, Acrobat, HTML, XML- represents some business or ideological agenda. Many believe Word and Acrobat are out to entrap users; HTML and XML enact a very limited kind of hypertext with great internal complexity. All imitate paper and
(internally) hierarchy.
For years, hierarchy simulation and paper simulation have been imposed throughout the computer world and the world of electronic documents.
Falsely portrayed as necessitated by "technology," these are really just the world-view of those who build software. I believe that for representing human documents and thought, which are parallel and
interpenetrating- some like to say "intertwingled"- hierarchy and paper simulation are all wrong.
This note is to announce a very special and very different piece of open-source software you can download and use now, for electronic documents radically different from anything out there- and a bigger plan.
I propose a different document agenda: I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper. In that case they can be far more powerful, with deep and rich new interconnections and properties- able to quote dynamically from other documents and buckle sideways to other documents, such as comments or successive versions; able to present third-party links; and much more.
Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm, where everything can be freely and legally quoted and remixed in any amount without negotiation.
It's time for an alternative to today's document systems, and we the loyal opposition have a proposal.
>>>Humanists please jump to transliterature.org, since what follows will be somewhat technical.
But first, some background. This will take a while.
BEFORE THE WEB, A GREATER DREAM
Long before there was a World Wide Web, there was a project with greater intent. This was Project Xanadu*, a bunch of clever, cynical idealists who believed in a dream of world-wide hypertext- somewhat like the web, but deeper and more powerful and more integrated, rooted in literary ideas, and mindful from the beginning of the copyright problems that would come. The project started unofficially in 1960 when I began to think about world-wide screen publishing, but grew to involve about a hundred participants and supporters over the last half-century.
(Note that I flip between "we" and "I" because this piece culminates work and ideas shared by a number of others over the decades; but I am presently acting alone, so whenever appropriate I am including those others by pronoun.)
Even from the beginning, we planned on unrestricted publishing of hypertext by millions of people; but web-like documents were only the beginning, only one possible form.
The Xanadu project asked at the beginning- not, "How do we imitate paper?", but "What if we could write in midair, without enclosing rectangles? What new ways can thoughts be connected and presented?" Many ideas and screen maneuvers came to mind, but they always sharpened down to this question:
"How can electronic documents on the screen IMPROVE on paper?" And our key answer was: "Keep each quotation connected to its original context."
This idea (now called "transclusion") is the center of our work and the center of my own beliefs. I
Parent
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:4, Insightful)
I have one more question: How would we know where to look next, while reading such a mess?
Written text has the very interesting property of linearity, which matches it to the linear processing of spoken discourse, for which we have hardwired functions in brain. How could you "improve" on that?
Parent
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:4, Insightful)
Even allowing skipping, if you find that one concept leads to another, do you only skip on to that if it respects the linear order (i.e. comes alphabetically later)?
When you start to read the WWW, do you start with TBL's original pages?
No, hypertext is something different... so why should this only apply (inadequately) between documents, and not within them?
Parent
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:5, Insightful)
When you start to read the WWW, do you start with TBL's original pages? No, hypertext is something different... so why should this only apply (inadequately) between documents, and not within them?
Because at some point you have to start feeding the brain information in the linear, spoken format it's designed to interpret. Linking and indexing is great for finding information, but not so good for consuming it. When you find the page you're looking for in the encyclopedia or on the web, you stop dealing with indices and hyperlinks, and start reading linearly. That's where the real gruntwork of information comprehension happens. There's no mystical transcendent mode of "uber-literacy" that allows one to absorb information better than the linear, serial way around which our human languages are designed, and for which we have trained ourselves to process since birth.
Parent
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:3, Insightful)
A page from the OED is a great contrary example - have a look...
I don't find a page, then read the whole thing from the first line - there are all kinds of cues (font, font size, colour, indentation) to the ability to read across a document, rather than linearly through it. I go back and forth over these structures within a page, not just to get there.
Unf
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:5, Insightful)
Christ Almighty, try to understand the greater meaning of my point rather than fixating on the literal meaning of my specific choice of words. When I used the word page, it was not to imply that once we reach the "page" level of organization, we start reading linearly. I used that word because it was a convenient point of similar terminology between encyclopedias and web sites. I shouldn't have to, but I will explain the point I was trying to make: Once you have found the what you are searching for (the encyclopedia entry, the web article, the OED entry, etc.) you start reading in the classic linear, serial fashion. This is the way human language works.
Parent
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:4, Interesting)
In re-defining page down to the sentences across which I scan hopping from structure to sructure down what I (very naively, obviously!) call a page, you miss the fact that these things are not individually accessed via HTTP and assembled, the whole thing (let's call it an HTML document, if you want to redefine the semantics of page) is one from the point of view of hyperlinking (save for anchors, which are completely inadequate).
I know you're trying to get me to concede that at some level I need to read word by word, which I have no problem doing, but you're missing the context of this entire discussion...
Parent
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:3, Interesting)
If I understood you correctly, you are complaining that you can't link to a
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:3, Insightful)
No, but I *do* start at the beginning of a paragraph, and respect "the order in which it would be spoken."
I suspect you do too. Or should I make that:
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I'd like to address this, because even though your direct argument ignores it, it seems to be included in your bias...
The eye pattern on some people may skip all over the page while reading, but that is irrelevant to the fact that the eye patterns aren't synchonous to the understanding of the written word. Each word has context within the sentences they make up, and each sentence has context within the paragraphs they make up.
This was what I was referring to by posting gibberish. If heirarchy and linearity really didn't matter, then you would have been able to understand what I'd written (as it was, you couldn't even determine the number of sentences or paragraphs.)
not all pages are arranged as series of paragraphs
Which is irrelevant.
HTML tries to force this
No, it doesn't. HTML doesn't try to do anything besides provide a way for the author to mark up their document. It doesn't force you to arrange your text in any way you don't wish to.
Here is where I think you're mistaken; it's the crux of my point, and :
people arrange their HTML pages as paragraphs of text because that's the most effective way of presentation. They don't do it because they're forced to, they do it because they want to.
You seem to be making the assumption that people's online writings are in paragraphs because they're forced to - when in fact it's the other way around: we interpret information in a particular fashion, and people write the way they read.
non-linear paragraphs/sentence in (...) diagrams are just as communicative in some situations. (emphasis mine)
Yes, but this misses two important points: first is my emphasis on "some" - it's not as communicative in *all*, and (as some might argue) that it's not as communicative in *most* situations. Second, HTML in no way forces you to lay out your words in any fashion. People just do it because they want it to make sense when others read it.
As an asize, I find it amusing that your assertions about how things should work are directly contradicted within the first few lines of the article by Dr. Nelson. To whit:
Permission is given to redistribute this but only in its entirety.
If it's so important to have paragraphs (or even sentences) be free-form, why doesn't he want you to post snippets of his article?
Parent
Re:Trans (complete text) (Score:3, Insightful)
This man has never heard of humility, has he? (Score:3, Insightful)
I read all of this, and I still don't get it. If you can't explain you ideas in that huge amount of words, maybe your concept is too complicated and nobody wants it? Maybe simplicity won for a reason?
Just a few ideas.
New slashdot saying (Score:2, Funny)
Re:New slashdot saying (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
why Ted is doomed to obscurity (Score:5, Interesting)
Alas, that is why Ted is doomed to obscurity. He has a decent point and then transitions into some hippiesh b.s. that won't even play well to his core utopian audience.
The form should not dictate the comment. And that point is where the techie utopians fail.
Re:why Ted is doomed to obscurity (Score:2)
To be able to collage freely is one of my objectives. So that you can just gather material in a new document, comment on it, annotate it, overlay it anyway you like and yet within a feasible copyright system - since we are not going to escape from copyright law - that allows this. That is what I have always tried to do.
It's never happened, nor is it likely to happen within his lifetime (at least, not by him anyway). People become famous f
*head explodes* (Score:5, Insightful)
Just give me an implementation of whatever you are thinking of, and I'll try to judge it, OK?
Re:*head explodes* (Score:3, Insightful)
Is a document format the answer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider the difference between Wikipedia and Everything2. Wikipedia is written by people who are interested in the topic at hand, and as such they link to relevant pages that are of interest to them. On the other hand, Everything2 seems to automatically link each "interesting" word to a seemingly random internal E2 page. The result is a useful and interesting encyclopedia in the former case and a jumbled, irrelevant mass of random information in the latter. Although this is just one case, it is very simple to extrapolate this result with any sort of grander version of E2 (e.g. Semantic Web).
What we need is a better way of presenting information and an easier method of linking sites of interest to the data we generate. What we don't need is some way to make everything a link.
Re:Is a document format the answer? (Score:2)
As far as I know all links on E2 are created by the people who write the nodes. There is no automatic linking. The links seem random because it is part of the E2 culture to link phrases to disparate nodes.
Re:Is a document format the answer? (Score:2)
Re:Is a document format the answer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh he's got that one covered. All content published in his new system would be placed under a particular license letting other people pretty much do whatever the hell they want with it. I don't think he's quite covered the business world angle yet. But I think he's ignoring that by saying "anyone who doesn't think my idea is a good one is too entrenched in the current set up." He then talks about creating a new breed of people under the new system. I bet he also wants
Re:Is a document format the answer? (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as having to fight his own corner for years, that in itself doesn't make him wrong. How long did Einstein (or Heisenberg) have to defend their ideas before they could show them part of the world (let alone p
This guy is complaining about ideological agendas? (Score:4, Insightful)
"I propose a different document agenda"
There's that word agenda, in the first two sentences of his solution)
"I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper"
Every humanist I know who's objecting to the ways of tekkies (love that spelling) starts off by proposing, "I believe we need new electronic documents". "freed from the traditions" also kinda sounds like someone with, umm, an agenda.
"Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm"
This one was priceless. He's going to build a realm. So he can finally call himself a *real* DM...
I believe... (Score:5, Funny)
And I believe that I need 10 million dollars by noon tomorrow. Unfortunately, in both cases, there is a "2. ???" step that needs to be filled in.
Needs a catchy name... (Score:2, Funny)
Web 3.0!
Baz
It's happening behind the scenes right now. (Score:3, Funny)
Meaningless doublespeak from a bitter old man (Score:3, Insightful)
Learn HTML, or at least learn to use a wiki, old-timer, and stop whining.
-Eric
I have no idea what's going on (Score:2, Funny)
A lack of substance (Score:5, Insightful)
[snipped]long ass answer that doesn't answer the question[/snipped]
Q: You haven't answered my question yet. How would life be different for me if we had?
A: I don't know.
So what's this guy talking about? All I can seem to pin down is he wants links to flow both ways (track-backs? Yeeesh. Haven't blogs taught us that these are horrible?) and he wants open-source document standards. Oh, and there's some talk of a license in this, he (again) doesn't mention any specifics, but the impression I get is his "new system" would have all content licensed under the one partiuclar license (which allows people to do whatever they like with it, from what I understood of his ramblings anyway).
He doesn't say HOW this is going to happen, he doesn't mention any benefits to it. Only that it would be a good thing.
Has he been more coherent and specific elsewhere? Or is he always like this?
Yes, he has been very specific (Score:4, Informative)
His other book "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" is more the political manifesto and historical document. That one's easier to get, it was published by Microsoft Press.
Parent
Specifics (Score:2)
Anyone can see that it wouldn't work. (Score:2)
Unfortunately, Mr. Nelson doesn't seem to favor organization at all except for the nebulous group of humanists dedicated to furthering his concept of "transclusion"... a group which apparently only has one memeber; himself.
His idea that everything should always remain l
Re:Anyone can see that it wouldn't work. (Score:3, Insightful)
they didn't get it (Score:4, Interesting)
Who knighted TBL? (WARNING: pedantry) (Score:4, Insightful)
"In a world that ... knights Tim Berners-Lee without an understanding of the pre-WWW background of stateless client/server document architectures ... on which he built..."
The world didn't knight Tim Berners-Lee, the British Government did, presumably because he's a British Citizen who has made a distinguished contribution to technology and society. We will probably never know whether a deeper understanding of the pre-WWW background of stateless client/server document architecture on the part of Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair would have had any impact on this decision.
Slashdot bigotry at it's highest proof... (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess everybody is too busy kissing the status-quo's ass to consider that things might change? What, something that's only been around for 30 years is all of a sudden hewwed in stone? Well, surprise, the technology you're married to now WILL crumble to dust eventually, as will your own dear bones, be it in a decade, a century, or a millenium. And other things WILL replace it. Be it by a new twist on an old scheme dreamed up out of some codger's half-gone imagination, or the fresh, new idea of young blood. Momento mori....
Re:Slashdot bigotry at it's highest proof... (Score:5, Insightful)
People resist change. Everyone knew that the WWW and http was nothing but a sloppy hack to begin with, but it filled a hole. coming up with something better will upset everyone that is used to the current standard (see the insane flamefests and screamfits that happen every time a new http standard is proposed) Humanity hates change, really hates having to learn something new and will lash out against anyone even considering changing what they do or how they do it.
IPV6 should have been here 5 years ago SMTP/POP email should have been replaced with something more robust and spoof-proof 6 years ago...
both are still on old broken systems because people do not like to change anything because of good old fear.
Parent
Quote Me (Score:5, Interesting)
While we're at it, I'd like servers to keep a "reference count" of objects they serve, so documents which refer to their objects can (optionally) register. I'd like servers to keep a database of all their referrable objects and their URLs, so an object whose URL changes (moved internally, externally or deleted) can simply return the response code so indicating. Servers like the "Internet Archive" could be much more useful if they accepted archives of low- or old- refcount objects from elsewhere. Other servers wouldn't be able to "disappear" objects without notice, which is extremely important now that publishers often deny some publications that have such an important effect on politics and business, revising them without notice to coverup various deceptions without accountability.
Many of the problems with making and using Internet documents in WWW and email are solved directly with those two "embedded reference" technologies. This Internet is starting to get old, without outgrowing some of its basic limitation. I want to quote any object (or fragment) from any document in any other, without copying it - just include a reference. We don't need to make a quantum leap to Nelson's Xanadu just to get some things right. Where are the versions of Evolution or Firefox that just use these simple technologies to do that?
Re:Quote Me (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the <object> element [w3.org], which the W3C says is for "generic inclusion" has been around for a number of years (since HTML 4.0). I believe it does what you w
Re:Quote Me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quote Me (Score:3, Insightful)
A perspective on Ted Nelson (Score:5, Interesting)
Ted Nelson is personally an incredibly scattered individual, and his whole thought process seems to be like a million mixed-media post-it notes flying around in a tornado through space and time. That is basically why he makes no sense to people (and vice-versa I'd guess). I truly believe that his driving motivation is to create a system of information that WORKS LIKE HE DOES. I don't in any way mean that to be insulting, it is pretty amazing really and I am strongly PRO Ted Nelson. But with that in mind, he needs everything to connect to everything in every single way and be visible from every different angle. In his brain, he doesn't have to leave one program and export his thoughts to another program, and negotiate the copyrights so that he can think properly. And he KNOWS that it's possible, but not too many people are really looking at the big picture. I don't think he's saying there's anything WRONG with the internet, he's just looking about 50 years into the future and wants to get there... sooner.
Remember, this is a guy who thought up hypertext and micro payments at a time when people were literally telling him he was insane. In the next thirty years they went from saying "that could never physically happen" to "even though it's probably technically possible people won't want that to happen" to "oh, yeah, that's obvious and totally unavoidable. Duh Ted. Why are you even talking to me about this ?". So the guy is a visionary and a long term thinker.
Though I do admit that sometimes it seems (like all visionaries) he doesn't seem to have enough respect for the people who are actually creating useful and IMPLEMENTABLE technology. Still, we've been exploring this stuff for 20+ years now, and major "conceptual" advances are just going so unbearably slowly.
So maybe that adds some perspective. It's just my opinion anyway...
Good glimpse inside the guy's brain (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks for the insight into Ted's way of doing things. That makes a lot of sense. So much of what we do is governed by our own peculiar ways of sifting the information we receive. For example, some posters have said that you can't do anything without heirarchy. Perhaps the experience of growing up working with computers makes most of us think that way, or maybe it's something hard-wired into most people at birth. The few people who do think in a radically nonlinear way tend to be either totally nuts or utterly brilliant, or a hybrid of the two.
If you're thinking that long and hard about how the world *should* be, as opposed to how it is, in a sense you're already living in something of a fantasy. The question is really whether you can do something to make your reality everyone else's reality. Hopefully Ted will have many more years to keep pushing for his vision. I don't necessarily think he's got a chance, or even that his vision is The One True Way, but it bothers me when people, particularly in Slashdot, kick a guy for being different.
Maybe we have fallen into the trap of only rewarding those original thinkers who have become famous, rich, or both.
Parent
Ignorant of the realities... (Score:3, Interesting)
I am all for a simplified documentation system that allows you to keep metadata regarding a document. XML and standards derived from it (Docbook, OpenDocument) fit the bill - and are about as uncomplicated as you can get while retaining that capability. The only thing simpler would be plain text. Of course you would lose any hyperlinking and metadata capability with that.
With XML we have the ability to extend the capabilities of our documents to imbed information - that is extensible for future improvements - and future proof because it is encoded in plain text.
Whatever we want to layer ontop of this is fine - and allows any expression you can think of.
The only part of that he mentioned that makes any sense at all was when he mentioned version control. We already have the tools for that - Subversion or CVS can be integrated in our documentation systems to handle real version control in XML documents.
The paper was not well thought out or delivered - particularly his reference to 'humanists good', 'technologists bad' -- what was that all about?
what can a visionairy see? (Score:3, Interesting)
But the idea that any media technology would somehow elevate the quality or the level of trust or remove/refine the effects that authorship and ownership have on documents when the power of any document is measured mostly in how many can access it...this flies in the face of human nature. People will ask "whose side is this document on?" of most documents with any information more contorversial than a bus schedule. Most documents that take any money or time to put before the public will go on line in spite of the required effort because the document is to someone's advantage. We can keep redefining what "document" means by changing the technology but we can't we can't change what effects the authors of documents want to achieve.
Ted Of Course Is Correct - But Irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is not the concept, but the implementation.
Without some solution to the problem of conceptual processing, Xanadu cannot be made to work, certainly not on the scale Ted has envisioned since the beginning.
And the experience over twenty years of trying to make it work clearly shows that it cannot work without some fundamental breakthrough in knowledge representation technology.
Now it might be possible to get the Web to allow "links in", as he puts it. AJAX is sort of a baby step to that possibility, perhaps. If your Web browser can run JavaScript to access a server database and update your page without reloading the entire page, I see no reason why it can't send a request to the server to access some sort of Google-index of all links to the page you're looking at, select links on some specified basis, and retrieve and send those links to your browser. The browser would receive only the links, not the entire pages, and could then organize them in some way, and present them to you in some overview form (assuming there are many), and then you could browse around in them, retrieving the pages they link to as desired.
The problem would be organizing them in some rational way - it might not be very well-done without conceptual processing, but something might be done along the lines of what the desktop search tools like Copernic and Google try to do. In other words, the browser might need to be integrated with a desktop search engine in some manner.
Just a (hazy) thought.
Nice to see Ted is still around, though. I listened to him at a West Coast Computer Faire back in the eighties, when he said there was no acceptable software on the market. He was right then, and he's still right about that now.
Re:Ted, meet wikipedia (Score:2)
The problem with those who don't know history... (Score:3, Interesting)