
Xanadu: we have a working deliverable - tagrun
http://xanadu.com/
======
straws
For those uninitiated, this is the Duke Nukem Forever of hypertext:

[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html)

    
    
      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.

~~~
jere
The website makes it look like the Time Cube of hypertext.
[http://www.timecube.com/](http://www.timecube.com/)

~~~
jafaku
What's that? I don't get it.

~~~
fennecfoxen
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.

~~~
yebyen
Wow. Just wow.

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.

------
drcode
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.

~~~
enkiv2
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.

------
pfraze
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.

1 [http://leoeditor.com/](http://leoeditor.com/)

~~~
e12e
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!

leo submission:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7843907)

------
jacquesm
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.

Edit: I see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7849533)
had that one first by a considerable margin.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.)

~~~
bitJericho
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.

------
GuiA
To the confused HNers:

Xanadu is a project by Ted Nelson.

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.

~~~
Tloewald
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.

~~~
polarix
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.

~~~
DennisP
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:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_(Project_Xanadu)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_\(Project_Xanadu\))

------
drzaiusapelord
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.

------
fiatjaf
"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."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

------
audiodude
Upvoted for pure hilarious insanity.

~~~
Semiapies
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

Though I'm not sure you're wrong.

------
DougWebb
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.

~~~
TuringTest
Just keep reading: mouse interactions are considered "advanced" (which may be
a good thing - it means you can do keyboard-only basic navigation):

ADVANCED DIRECTIONS (mouse OK now)

\- scrollwheel: go up and down in xanadoc or sourcedoc

\- clicking on any page takes you to it

\- spacebar + shift: step through three views

~~~
DougWebb
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.

------
EGreg
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?

~~~
captainmuon
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.

~~~
EGreg
Well cookies have a same-origin security policy for good reason, right? You
don't want a
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem)
... otherwise the web would be horribly insecure.

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/](http://xkcd.com/792/)

~~~
captainmuon
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.

~~~
EGreg
Yes without cookies it should be able to, since it can via a proxy. this
should be a capability of browsers

------
vezzy-fnord
Oh wow, and just as I was rereading the (in)famous "Curse of Xanadu" article:
[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html)

EDIT: Wait, is there anything new here? Hasn't OpenXanadu been around for a
while?

------
keeperofdakeys
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.

I strongly recommend people to read this wired article about it
[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html).
Also some responses to the article. one from someone from Project Xanadu
[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html).

~~~
jpatokal
...except that this release doesn't actually support links, which makes it a
bit pointless. Maybe in another 40 years...

\- links, connections and relations (XANALINKS-- NOT YET) \- shared content
between xanadocs (MUTUAL TRANSCLUSION, NOT YET)

------
afternooner
Why can I not do this with my git commits? If you're trying to track down a
blame on a security bug, this would be an amazing way to expose that.

------
madsushi
This is actually a pretty cool way to do annotated sources. While the
explanatory page is a bit eccentric, it looks like some fun tech.

------
smoyer
"World wide hypertext - The Web got that niche"

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.

------
muaddirac
It's impressive that it can run in a browser now.

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).

------
leoh
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.7 [en-gb] (WinNT; U) [Netscape]">

------
sp332
Some discussion and several lectures expounding on Nelson's ideas, from
earlier this year
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639599)
or "Ted Nelson's computing paradigms expressed as one-liners"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771992)

------
cell303
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.

------
normloman
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?

I'm glad we didn't end up with xanadu.

------
kefka
How peculiar. I just mentioned this project 2 days ago regarding URL
shorteners..

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836851)

Its nice to see a release of something here.

~~~
Famicoman
Funny enough, I've spent the last two weeks researching Nelson and getting my
hands on his books to scan high resolution copies of.

------
zacinbusiness
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.

------
sergiotapia
I have absolutely no idea what this is, and the wikipedia link below doesn't
help. What is this supposed to be/do? I just see an image loading.

------
philliphaydon
I don't understand how to read the website...

------
ulisesrmzroche
This says not to use the mouse but it seems to works the same with it. Am I
missing something?

I actually like it though, it's kinda fun.

~~~
omaranto
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.)

------
mark_l_watson
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.

------
laichzeit0
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.

------
dscrd
I'm saddened to know that this genius will go to his grave thinking that he
failed somehow.

~~~
RankingMember
Everyone dies having failed at many things in many ways. I don't see what's
sad about that.

~~~
protomyth
Heck, if you don't have a stack of failures when you exit this place, then you
really didn't try a whole lot.

------
softbuilder
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?

~~~
rsl7
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.

------
mcmire
Anyone else get a JavaScript error when they attempt to load the demo?

~~~
mcmire
Only runs on Firefox, it seems.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
It runs in chrome for me.

------
jayvanguard
That's it?!? All these years and now there is incontrovertible evidence there
was no substance behind the idea.

------
a2800276
Hmmm, 1997 called and wanted their stylesheet back and they actually gave it
back?

------
mike415
Next RapGenius

~~~
captainmuon
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.

------
Duhveed
w.t.f.?

------
gfodor
behold, the leaky-ist of abstractions

------
benigeri
What is this?

~~~
tagrun
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

------
hrttrht
It's clearly another site by the time cube guy.

