"...Also today I came across the latest project of a man who
wants to tear down Tim Berners-Lee's World
Wide Web and replace it with his own vision. It used to be known as
Xanadu, but has since morphed into Transliterature, A Humanist
Design. I am of course referring to Ted Nelson, who
invented the term 'hypertext' in 1965 and is generally regarded as
a computing pioneer.
Ted Nelson recently wrote an essay about
'Indirect Documents', which got
Slashdotted today. In the essay Nelson outlines why (in his
opinion) the Xanadu project failed and he explains his new vision
for Transliterature. He takes a number of potshots at Tim
Berners-Lee's WWW on the way, e.g.:
'Why don't I like the web? I hate its flapping and screeching
and emphasis on appearance; its paper-simulation rectangles of
Valuable Real Estate, artifically created by the NCSA browser, now
hired out to advertisers; its hierarchies exposed and imposed; its
untyped one-way links only from inside the document. (The one-way
links hidden under text were a regrettable simplification of
hypertext which I assented to in '68 on the HES project. But that's
another story.) Only trivial links are possible; there is nothing
to support careful annotation and study; and, of course, there is
no transclusion.'
Ted Nelson is certainly an original and I'm glad he's still
around to throw spanners in the works. I've written
about him before and I'm sure I will again, Web 2.0 or not.
"
(Excerpted From: Read/Write Web.)
My thoughts on the commentary above:
There is nothing fundamentally incompatible between Ted Nelson's
pursuits and future incarnation's of the Web. None whatsoever -- we
are simply working our way through an process. The process in
question is what I call "standards driven ubiquity" (becoming de
facto at Internet Speed). Remember Sun's "The Network is the
Computer" vision? Well, without a "Computer" in mind-space you
can't think in terms of "Operating Systems". Thats all changing,
because today we are gradually beginning to accept the imminent
reality that "The Internet is the Operating System" and not
Windows/UNIX/Mac OS X/Others. Ahem! And after the Operating System
what comes next? I think a set of Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs), and I think we know what that is (in all of its
controversial
glory), the very thing we refer to as
Web 2.0 (the APIs for the Internet Operating System).
Note: In addition to the Computer, Operating System, and
Application Programming Interfaces, we also have those frequently
misunderstood and under-appreciated workhorses called "Databases"
in place (but we still call them Web Sites for now). And by the
way, "Internet Filesystem" has been there forever, but for some
reason we can't see WebDAV in
all its current and future glory (that will change very soon
also!).
Ted and TBL are cool with each (whether they know it or not)! I
see no mutual exclusivity in their collective visions (IMHO)
:-)