From Ted Nelson at ted.hyperland.com
I DON'T BUY IN
The Web isn't hypertext, it's DECORATED DIRECTORIES!
What we have instead is the vacuous victory of typesetters over authors, and the most trivial form of hypertext that could have been imagined.
The original hypertext project, Xanadu®, has always been about pure document structures where authors and readers don't have to think about computerish structures of files and hierarchical directories. The Xanadu project has endeavored to implement a pure structure of links and facilitated re-use of content in any amounts and ways, allowing authors to concentrate on what mattered.
Instead, today's nightmarish new world is controlled by "webmasters", tekkies unlikely to understand the niceties of text issues and preoccupied with the Web's exploding alphabet soup of embedded formats. XML is not an improvement but a hierarchy hamburger. Everything, everything must be forced into hierarchical templates! And the "semantic web" means that tekkie committees will decide the world's true concepts for once and for all. Enforcement is going to be another problem :) It is a very strange way of thinking, but all too many people are buying in because they think that's how it must be.
There is an alternative.
Markup must not be embedded. Hierarchies and files must not be part of the mental structure of documents. Links must go both ways. All these fundamental errors of the Web must be repaired. But the geeks have tried to lock the door behind them to make nothing else possible.
We fight on.
More later.
==================
Ted Nelson Bio:
Theodor Holm Nelson, 1937-
Formal Education
• B.A., Swarthmore, Philosophy, 1959.
• M.A. Harvard, Sociology, 1963.
• Ph.D. Keio University, Media and Governance, 2002. (Thesis: "Philosophy of Hypertext.").
Books
• Life, Love, College, etc., 1959. Collected columns from the Swarthmore Phoenix.
• Computer Lib/Dream Machines, 1974. Updated Microsoft edition, 1987.
• The Home Computer Revolution, 1977. Translated also into Japanese and Swedish.
• Literary Machines, 1981. Major revision, 1987. Translated also into Japanese and Italian.
• The Future of Information, 1997. Published in Japan in one special edition.
Patents
• United States Patent 6,058,381(May 2, 2000). "Many-to-many payments system for network content."
• United States Patent 6,262,736 (July 17, 2001). "Interactive connection, viewing, and maneuvering system for complex data." This is a software patent for zzstructure (see Designs, below), a discrete multidimensional generalization of lists and tables.
Principal Software Designs
• Xanadu literary structure and software architecture (described in Literary Machines). Often confused with the much-simpler World Wide Web, Xanadu is an ongoing family of software and document designs architected for side-by-side intercomparison, unrestricted re-use of content, and profuse overlapping links. I still believe it will have an important place in the electronic document world.
• Transpointing Windows, a sweeping alternative to today's interface designs, which actually preceded them (published in my 1972 article, "As We Will Think"), and given the present generic name in my 1995 ACM article "The Heart of Connection: Hypermedia Unified by Transclusion", 1995). A functioning demonstration of transpointing windows is downloadable at xanadu.com/cosmicbook.
• ZZstructure, a discrete software kernel structure built around multidimensional lists, offering unique forms of content connection and visualization. ZZstructure projects are known to be underway in Australia, Japan, Finland, England and of course the USA, where it is trademarked as "ZigZag" and patented (see U.S. patent above). An excellent early review of ZigZag by Michael Swaine is to be found in the December 1998 issue of Dr.Dobbs Journal.
Honors
• 1968: Auburn Lecturer, Union Theological Seminary (shared with Kenneth Boulding).
• 1998: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Web Award, WWW7, Brisbane, Australia.
• 2001: Knighted by France as "Officier des Arts et Lettres."
==============
QUOTABLE FORMAT
The most important thing is to re-introduce the concept of deep quotability to hypertext, always part of the original hypertext project.
The first issue is the formats and delivery that can allow quotation from stored text. I have worked out, with my colleagues at Keio University and the University of Southampton, delivery formats that allow quotation in any part.
Naturally they are completely incompatible with current Web browsers (strange hybrids of gaudiness and restriction based above all on hierarchical structure). We hope to fix that. Meanwhile, using these formats, it is currently possible to open quotations in a window, and we hope to have a browser plug-in one of these days that can assemble quoted portions taken from different documents.
To practice what I preach, I will be publishing mostly in text format from a quotable server. It may not look as pretty as some stuff that's out there, but I prefer to offer this deeper functionality. |
