Hypertext Creator: Structure of the Web 'Completely Wrong'

angry tapir writes "The creator of hypertext has criticized the design of the World Wide Web, saying that Tim Berners-Lee's creation is 'completely wrong,' and that Windows, Macintosh and Linux have 'exactly the same' approach to computing. Ted Nelson, founder of first hypertext project, Project Xanadu, went on to say, 'It is a strange, distorted, peculiar and difficult limited system... the browser is built around invisible links — you can see something to click on but you’ve got nowhere else to go.'"

The Xanadu Project?

[AdmiralXyz]

You mean that thing that's supposed to be superior to the World Wide Web, but that's been in development hell for the last fifty years? (Duke Nukem Forever, most delayed software ever? Ha.) Someone needs to tell this guy that it doesn't matter how superior your invention is if no one ever sees it. Like Steve Jobs said, "Real artists ship."

Re:WTF?

[hey!]

Practically everything we take for granted about the Internet was what I'd call a "WTF proposition" when it was proposed.

Re:WTF?

[RingDev]

His concept is effectively a free-form multi-document interface where hyperlinks open into a new window. That description doesn't do it justice though. Think of it like each block of content, each paragraph, each page, each image, is not limited to the context which it is in. You can do, as the quote suggest, strike out some content that is between the two pieces you want, or branch out diagnally.

Think if it more like a 6 degrees of Kevin Baccon interface, only for every piece of content. Wikipedia is the most obvious example of where it would be useful. Being able to see the content of mid-sentence links with out having to leave the page you are on.

It's a pretty cool concept, but not big enough (IMO) to displace the current browsing experience.

-Rick

Re:What is Project Xanadu

[tomhuxley]

If you think of Xanadu as a highly available redundant P2P document system mixing in TBL's Semantic Web and adding more automation, you get a bit closer to what Ted Nelson was trying to do with Xanadu.

http://xanadu.com.au/general/faq.html [xanadu.com.au]

Section two of the FAQ covers what a Xanadu system was supposed to entail.

This article (originally on Wired) covers some of the controversies that have broiled up:

http://aether.com/archives/the_curse_of_xanadu.html [aether.com]

If you can find Nelson's 1982 Datamation article it is pretty interesting but I couldn't find it anymore after some quick Google searches (YMMV).

Re:Wikipedia's not so bad

[skids]

Basically he's arguing for bringing that even further. For example, in Wikipedia, there's a separate main page and discussion page, and on the discussion page, things have to be categorized and organized. Under his model, instead of having this, a person that wished to lodge a new comment or question about a certain bit of text would highlight the text they were commenting on, do some sort of drag-and-drop-like operation to comment on it, and write their comments.

Then another user browsing the comments would do so by browsing the main document, and hovering over a word they would be able to see a list of comments made on "phrases" (using the term loosely) containing that word.

I suspect the people that dream of wikifying the legislative process have similar ideas about granular live documents, as that would be where this type capability would be needed most obviously.

Re:WTF?

[Daniel_Staal]

In one of Asimov's books he describes doing research/reading in the Imperial Library of Trantor; I think that's what this guy is trying to describe. Links become basically infinite depth background trees on any word or phrase or sentence or paragraph or whatever level you want.

Which would be amazing, in an academic context. But I'm not sure it would be more useful in a wider context than what we have now.

Re:Smokin'

[metamatic]

For an example of a wiki that has better (but still limited) support for transclusion, see Wagn [wagn.org].

The problem with true hypertext as described by Ted Nelson is that it's a hard problem to solve. Your document editor really needs to be aware of the transclusions, or else you need some really complicated diff algorithm to work out your changes and then apply them properly.

That said, we probably would have seen a working example, if the Xanadu Project hadn't suffered from project management disasters. (Waterfall model, development in secret, second system effect, name an antipattern and they probably did it.)

It's also rather sad that his books are hard to obtain and not on the web, so people are generally unaware of how much actual useful work was done and how good the concepts were.

Re:It's all about DRM

[Sentrion]

This has always been his design from the very beginning, so of course I'm sure he's upset that so much of the web is free, both free as in speech and free as in beer. The founding fathers of the USA had good intentions, but I imagine that many of them would be shocked to see that we allow women, minorities, and non-landowners to vote in our elections. Just because the guy was first to come up with the idea does not mean that the idea cannot be improved upon. And if the end result is better than the founder's initial vision we have no obligation to turn back progress for sentimental reasons. Edison invented the phonograph but was not successful at running his record company. IBM pioneered the PC but they are no longer in that game. Time for Nelson to sit back down in his page of history and let progress move on without him.

Won't work

[KnowThePath]

Thanks for the link. The idea is brilliant and radical (and for perhaps the first time a youtube video where the comments underneath made sense ;-) ). However structure of paper document he accuses of being limiting reflects how our brains are geared to work. Having all those parallel hypertexts and floating links would be quite distracting - cross linking on wikipedia for example is distracting [xkcd.com] enough on its own. Footnotes, references and asides are what they are for a reason - they are not the actual subject of the document - and hence should not distract the reader whose brain can process only one stream of thought at once. Besides, as someone else note above, I can't see how this would scale with more than handful of documents. Who's to say what the URI for a piece of text is and where it lives? Does modifying one its "hyper references" modify every instance? And he needs to stop using cheesy terminologies like flinks (floating linnks, apparently!) if he wants to be taken seriously.