[IP] INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer Agenda.
Begin forwarded message:
From: Ted Nelson <nelsberg@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 24, 2005 7:12:50 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist
Computer Agenda.
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to eriknelson2002, Dbb147 ...
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- Show quoted text -
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to akeller, alexandre.cald. ...
More options 10:46 am (2 hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
- Show quoted text -
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to ejw
More options 10:58 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to Wendy, nrs, tandm
More options 10:58 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to DOUG, jackpark, bill ...
More options 10:59 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to frode, vinton.g.cerf, tandm
More options 10:59 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to sommer, tandm
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________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to delacoste, tandm
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trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
- Show quoted text -
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to brewster, tandm
More options 11:03 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to sommer, tandm
More options 11:05 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to Susan, tandm
More options 11:06 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to Roberto.Civita, tandm
More options 11:08 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to Jeffrey, Rosie, Matthew ...
More options 11:09 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to david.vaver, tandm
More options 11:09 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to Arthur, adham.tamer, tandm
More options 11:09 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to Ka-Ping, tandm
More options 11:09 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
V. Professor, U. Southampton; V. Fellow, Wadham College
Founder, Project Xanadu (the first hypertext project), 1960+
• e-mail: tandm@xxxxxxxxxx • http://ted.hyperland.com,
• xanadu.com • translit.org • transcopyright.org
• world-wide phone and fax +1/908-847-0264
_________________________________________________
ReplyReply to allForwardInvite Ted to Google Mail
Ted Nelson to interns-announ., tandm
More options 11:12 am (1½ hours ago)
- Show quoted text -
trollout-D17
===05.10.24
Subject: • INDIRECT DOCUMENTS AT LAST! Now for a Humanist Computer
Agenda.
From: Ted Nelson, grebnetugÄxanadu.net
Cited addresses:
transliterature.org/transquoter
xanadu.com.au/transquoter
transliterature.org
transcopyright.org
trans© 2005 T. Nelson, stable at
hyperland.com/trollout.txt
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 believe it will give great powers to
authors,
readers– and publishers. And transclusion is what we are now
delivering.
But till now the world has gone in a very different direction. At Xerox
PARC they candy-coated tradition and called it the future. They
candy-coated hierarchical directories into 'folders' and candy-coated
lump
files into font-lavish simulations of paper. (This was all intended,
mind
you, to support secretaries.) To view it all they created an aviary of
ever-flapping windows with no visible connections. (For our radically
different connected-windowing proposal of 1972, see
xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/PARALUNE/paraviz.html
and download the much-later prototype by Ian Heath, xanadu.com/
cosmicbook.
See also "The Heart of Connection," in bibliography at end.)
This PARC pantheon of effects and structures (miscalled "the GUI") has
taken over everywhere, to the detriment of the world's authors,
editors and
readers. It has become the standard computer paradigm– the same on
Windows, Macintosh and Linux: the simulation of hierarchy and the
simulation of paper as frozen by Xerox PARC, with each document a lump
file. Nearly everything on computers today elaborates these traditions.
(The most extreme example of gratuitous paper simulation is Adobe
Acrobat,
a canopic jar to keep documents from escaping.)
These traditions are miscalled "computer basics" as if they were
cosmically
necessary. I believe today's computer world is based on tekkie
misunderstandings of human thought and human life.
The Xanadu project, on the other hand, is based on the structure of
connected ideas, which we represented by open parallel data. In the
early
eighties we found a generalized format and delivery system for all
documents, allowing unbreakable deep interconnection (links and
transclusions) in many layers and vast quantity. Links may be of many
types, which anyone may put on any documents from outside, since they
are
parallel and external. All links may be followed in any direction (not
just two directions, since they can be n-ary.) The markup and links
outside the content are what we mean by open parallelism.
Perhaps most important, this method can keep all quoted materials
connected
to their original sources (our original idea of transclusion). Among
other
things, this implies a vividly simple copyright system where anything
may
be quoted freely, because it is easy to arrange the payment of
royalty to
publishers for those portions brought from different documents. These
methods can provide windows, doorways, tunnels into all the world's
documents– at least those documents opted into this form of rights
management– making it easy for people to sample and anthologize broadly
from the great Niagara of copyrighted materials, and in principle making
all documents freely re-usable without copyright violation.
("Freely" in
Stallman's sense of "free speech, not free beer.")
This is why veterans of the Xanadu project see today's Balkanized
document
formats, including the Babel of World Wide Web file types, as way
overcomplicated, far too restrictive, and fundamentally broken.
But the Xanadu project went wrong-footed. Along the way we had
political/implementational screwups and we lost our place in line.
Thirty-two years after we started, another hypertext system caught
on– far
more traditional, packaging together the standard traditions of lump
files,
hierarchy simulation and paper simulation. It bound the links
unreachably
inside the lump files, making the links one-way.
In recent years the Xanadu project has been derided, disgraced and
largely
forgotten. That will change. If Xerox PARC was the leading
university of
software teams, big and conventional and smug, Project Xanadu was the
Black
Mountain College, small and feisty and defiantly original. Also like
Black
Mountain, also disbanded, its influence has been much wider than people
know.
WHAT WENT WRONG
Project Xanadu progressed slowly but well through decades of no
funding, my
colleagues creating the great xu88 design in 1980-1. In 1983,
because the
others demanded freedom to find backers, I signed a deal (the infamous
"Silver Agreement") to let the others make the technical decisions
provided
I could oversee the publishing system (my central concern being our open
copyright model). Five years later, backing hit like a hurricane. But
sloshed by money, swollen by newcomers and wholly out of my hands, the
project spiralled out of control with all the classic mistakes at
once: too
many cooks, bridges too far, horses in midstream, and Second System
Syndrome. And the new people took the software in another direction,
digressing from open parallelism.
It all crashed; four years and millions in funding were wasted and
the new
software was unfinishable. By the time the smoke cleared I was left
standing with only the trademark in hand, to pick up the pieces by going
back to the previous version. The other participants, less
committed, went
their separate ways, except for Roger Gregory and briefly a few others.
BERNERS-LEE, AND THE IRRUPTION OF THE WEB
On the day in 1992 that Autodesk funding collapsed, a young man came
to see
me in my office. He showed me a simpleminded hypertext system he had
cooked up. I was polite, didn't say anything negative about it, and
took
him to lunch. Since then I have watched aghast as this and shallow
system,
doing only small parts of what we were trying to do (and in a completely
wrong way), has taken over the world.
Now, I have great liking and respect for Tim Berners-Lee, who is a
good and
decent and honorable and very nice guy, of whom I have not the slightest
personal criticism whatever. I believe that his ideals are probably the
same as mine at some level of abstraction.
All that said, I don't think Tim and I agree on anything in the
universe.
He bases his ideas on computer tradition: hierarchy, and legacy
mechanisms
of files and directories. I base my ideas on the nature of ideas and
literature and what I believe human beings need for keeping track of
ideas
and presenting them, for which I believe the imposition of hierarchy,
files
and exposed directories are highly destructive. It goes on from there.
What Tim could not show me in 1992– someone else's work, the other half
that made the web take off– had not yet come out of the cornfields of
Illinois. What we now call the web browser was created by gallivanting
college students (Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), brilliant programmers
throwing together a random salad of convenient effects as fast as they
could. Now their decisions are hallowed, as "web formats" to be
cherished
and standardized (except, of course, browsers never seem to match).
These
quick choices made at the U. of Illinois defined the basics of what
could
be on a "web page" and especially how it would interact.
The World Wide Web– Tim's early design as boxed up and enhanced by
the lads
in Illinois– has validated all our early predictions for the benefits
and
wonderfulness of anarchic world-wide hypertext publishing, where
anyone can
publish internationally, without prior restraint, at very low cost.
("Most
people don't want to publish," said arch-publisher William Jovanovich
to me
in 1966. I said everyone did. "Oh, you mean VANITY publishing," he
said.
Since he was my boss, I had to stifle the urge to explain that ALL
publishing is vanity publishing.)
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.
For the last decade I have studied high and low, trying to figure out
how
to fix the web to do what I believe in, looking at server kludges, code
embedments, Javascript and Java tweaks, frames, database approaches,
blah
blah blah, because there was no obvious way to go in the great salad
of the
web's intricate narrow options. (I believe millions of others
experience
this daily, but with not enough knowledge to be indignant.)
Finally I realized: nothing further that I believe in can be done on the
World Wide Web, period. So why compromise with the World Wide Web at
all?
That was the breakthrough. Let's just simplify the Xanadu structure to
work in the present environment. BACK TO THE FUTURE! Perhaps another
dumbdown of Xanadu can still get traction today– de-generalizing it,
dropping capabilities in order to piggyback on existing protocols and
servers. After all, dumbing down Xanadu sure worked well for Tim
Berners-Lee!
STARTING OVER
I have now adapted and simplified Xanadu (reference version xu88.1)
to the
existing ambient structures of files and protocols–
• as a usable mini-system for transquotation, downloadable now
(and yes,
it's open source)
• as the general design of a new document infrastructure,
Transliterature*, to support profuse linking, transclusion, and game-
like
3D documents.
But Transliterature will have to have new viewers– fortunately a lot
less
complicated than web browsers.
Transliterature (see transliterature.org) is intended as an alternative
system of electronic documents, zoomable, animatable, with vast
numbers of
connections where desired– including of course the connection of re-used
content to its original contexts. Currently Transliterature is a
sketchy
set of open-source specs for a wholly different kind of document and
electronic literature, and the specs are still evolving. Nonetheless,
there's enough there that bright kids could easily get up a
prototype; my
only request is that such prototypes (if any) be brought forward against
the specs as they evolve.
I regret not being able to put up a more polished presentation, but
time is
very scarce and getting scarcer. I would have done the illustrations
with
a draw program, but hand sketches are much quicker. (I note that
Laurence
Tribe, Harvard Law professor and Supreme Court advocate, uses his own
sketches unabashedly, and so must I.)
THE TRANSQUOTER*, A PRESENT DELIVERABLE
But Transliterature may take a long time. For a quick foretaste, help
yourself to the Xanadu Transquoter–
• explained at transliterature.org/transquoter
• downloadable at xanadu.com.au/transquoter
• programmed by Andrew Pam.
The Transquoter allows you to create a document which quotes dynamically
from all over the net (textfiles and web pages) and keeps each quoted
portion connected to its original context. Just as we always said,
transclusive documents. (Only last summer, a web founder told me
this was
impossible.) I believe the Transquoter is the first deployed program
for
dynamic quotation with maintained transclusive connection.
THE TRANSLITERARY PLAN
The Transquoter is of course just the opening shot, a come-on for
Transliterature. The Transquoter, and someday Transliterature, will
facilitate sending and publishing of new documents drawing freely on
pre-existing content, all remaining connected their original contexts.
The transliterary design is client-side for numerous reasons, including
both legal issues and ease of deployment. It should be usable by anyone
from anywhere, and requires no special servers (though a boost can be
provided by the popular EPrints server from the University of
Southampton,
one of our project hosts.) Its open parallel data structure is
extremely
simple (streams of content portions to which streams of relations are
applied).
Like it or not, discerning readers will have to acknowledge that this
new
Transliterature design represents a plausible and simple
infrastructure for
a completely different world of hypermedia– resolutely nonhierarchical,
free-form and no longer constrained to the web browser (though it can
project to the web browser by limiting its capabilities).
Students write to me for help with their homework, saying they have to
write essays about the original 1960 vision of world-wide hypertext, and
how does it play out today? Well, students everywhere, the World
Wide Web
was, let's say, the first 15% of that vision. Transliterature/xu88
should
provide the tools for the next 50%, including especially our copyright
initiative.
I don't want to kick over the chessboard, just enlarge it. A lot. Do I
give a flap about "web standards"? Let's put it this way: I think I
feel
about web standards the way Tim felt about my standards in 1992. Ask
him.
Many will be quick to call the Transliterature design "Vaporware," even
though the Transquoter exists. But Transliterature is an agenda, not a
promise, and I offer no dates of availability. (I believe something
isn't
"vaporware" till you've promised it– a mistake I don't intend to make
again.)
The real issue is: are we right? If the Xanadu model is workable, as
embodied in Transliterature, perhaps there are big changes in store. I
hope people of ability will study this design, which is much more
accessible than the Xanadu version on which it is based.
VERY DIFFERENT IDEAS
Transliterature should make possible any shape of document in 3D
gamespace
or even more dimensions, but we won't go there right now. (What call
the
client? Perhaps "Flowser*," FLying brOWSER ?-)
But more important than appearance, it should make possible
• deep profuse overlapping links by anyone, by anyone and on
anything,
user-selectable
• everything quotable and connectable and annotatable, both
into and from
transliterary documents
• import-viewing of documents from a variety of formats, and
maintaining
stable connections to them
• indirect delivery (with its extraordinary advantages, such
as unbreaking
links to absolute addresses)
• being able to see all content and connections raw
• every portion connected to its original source (1-level
transclusion.
Note that "transclusion" is now defined as "the same content knowably in
more than one place")
• user-selectable views, effects and markup, leaving behind
fixed paper
simulation (as propagandized by the expression "WYSIWYG"), offering
instead
the more libertarian WYSIWYL (What You See Is What You Like)
• 3D animated text, 3D zooms and sworfs (swooping morphs),
transparent and
fade-in overlays (WYSIWYNC, What You See Is What You Never Could
(before))
At least and at last, the Transliterature design offers a simple,
workable,
lightweight infrastructure to make all these things possible.
Transliterature may seem complicated to those fixated on the web's
original
simplicity, but in fact Transliterature is far simpler than the
baroque web
of today.
THE COPYRIGHT ISSUE
Our copyright solution has always been the Holy Grail of the Xanadu
Project, and the idea is still good as gold. But first we had to have
indirect documents. More is needed, but now it can start.
The world's copyright wrangling is now totally polarized– Valenti and
Bertelsmann versus a million kids– but polarization, with the right
glasses, sometimes shows what no one else can see. Our polarized
glasses
(try them on at transcopyright.org) show a world– a possible new
community
of documents on the Net– where everyone can re-use and re-mix freely and
legally, even with paid content. It requires indirect documents that
bring
in content by reference (transclusion again)– but that is now
possible with
the Xanadu Transquoter. Which is just the beginning. Please share our
vision.
The transcopyright proposal is a win-win solution to support everyone:
readers, authors, and later commercial publishers– in a proposed new
system
of commerce based on microsale.
A lot of the open source people say, "How dare you be in favor of
payment?
Everything should be free!" Answer: we're talking about the real
world,
where content is owned under law and already sold on line; and we are
now
asking publishers to sell it in minute amounts.
Think of it this way: How can digital rights management be the most
open
and the most beneficial for all? Transcopyright publishing is our
answer–
a daylight and legally valid method within the iron reality of a world
where content is sold.
THE WIRED ATTACK
Before I leave the keyboard where I now sit, I must face once again the
issue of the Wired attack. The article, "The Curse of Xanadu," was
published ten years ago now, but it comes up in nearly every
discussion of
Project Xanadu and my work. The article is a sewer of lies,
concealments
and fabrications, steaming with malice, signed by an author whom we may
refer to as Gory Jackal.
The purpose of the article was to dishonor and destroy our work, to
annihilate our reputations and our ideas, to hide the depth and
integrity
of the Xanadu project and present us as clueless bozos; to make sure
we had
no access to respect or funding, even in the dot-com feeding frenzy that
was underway; and above all to deny us any credit for the thinking
behind
the World Wide Web. So far its dastardly purposes have been quite
successful.
During the course of the article, Jackal successively implies:
1) that I am a terrifyingly reckless driver;
2) that I am a drug addict;
3) that I am mentally defective;
4) that my every utterance in the course of my life has been
incoherent
and offensive;
5) that my work was driven by ignorance;
6) that my Xanadu colleagues and I were slap-happy, deluded
twits
attempting the impossible with toothpicks and string;
7) that my colleague Roger Gregory is an ignorant
"repairman" (on account
of a job he once had);
8) that we were all clinically insane.
However obliquely averred, these are all damned lies.
Jackal ransacks my life (even my childhood) for suggestive scraps to be
presented with loathing and mockery. He has a morbid interest in the
contents of my pockets (to which he devotes paragraphs) but not even a
perfunctory interest in my ideas, misstating them left and right. So
busy
is he with his duties as judge, jury, executioner and psychoanalyst
that he
has little time to get things right, misdating the Silver Agreement
by five
years, misdating the start of nondisclosure agreements by eighteen
years,
feigning astonishment at our ups and downs as if not knowing this is how
labor-of-love projects go.
EXAMPLE OF HIS CONCEALMENTS: Nowhere does Jackal mention the deep media
background I brought to the computer field at the age of 22: that in
the
late forties I had watched a new medium being born sitting behind my
father
in television control rooms; that I had won prizes in poetry and
playwriting; that I had acted on television and the professional stage;
that I had published a book and a long-playing record; and that I had
written what was apparently the first rock musical (it ran for two
nights
as scheduled at Swarthmore College in November 1957). Jackal deigns to
mention my 26-minute student film but only to claim falsely that it was
unfinished.
My early experience in these many projects across the media board
made me
extremely confident as a designer and media innovator, and led me to
recognize at once the potential of the computer screen and hypertext
publishing even long before I saw a computer screen. It was this
background that gave me an auteurist, lone film-maker's perspective
on how
software should be developed– as a branch of cinema and under the
visionary
supervision of a director who controls all aspects.
You would think that media background was relevant to the
understanding of
my work, wouldn't you? Instead Jackal just calls me a "strange
researcher."
EXAMPLE OF HIS LIES: Jackal repeatedly describes me as "ignorant," and
what are the particulars please? His repeated assertions of my
ignorance
gurgle down to two claims: that I didn't know enough about advanced
software to be discouraged (HAH!), and that I didn't know why others
doubted my ideas. These are both abject lies; I knew perfectly well why
others didn't think world-wide hypertext could be done, essentially
because
they didn't want to understand what we were actually attempting.
There are more like that.
Jackal deceitfully and viciously presents my Xanadu colleague Roger
Gregory
as an ignorant dreamer, repeatedly referring to him as a "repairman"
(somehow intended to suggest cluelessness), where in fact Roger is a
brilliant generalist and polymath– and yes, he IS a rocket scientist
(see
U.S. Patent no. 6,212,876).
Jackal's article deserves careful analysis for the cleverness and
subtlety
of its deceptions, and I intend it will become known to posterity as a
classic of deceit next to the Protocols of Zion. But that is for
another
day. The hell with Gory Jackal; I think he was just a paid assassin, a
liar for hire, and that the real perpetrators were publisher-editors
Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly, who had all pretended to be friends of
mine,
and without all of whose enthusiastic support this attack could not have
been so lovingly and lavishly mounted. Each of them knew, I am sure,
both
the article's deceit and the vicious consequences of that deceit for my
colleagues and especially me, the only participant who could not leave
Xanadu behind– an all-out full-frontal assault on my life, my
character, my
intellect, and everything I stand for, hope for and believe in.
There have been various conspiratorial theories about why they did this,
but I that's not necessary. It was simply a witch-burning.
As the principal celebrants and sycophants of the World Wide Web,
Wired's
Gang of Three had a vested interest in silencing dissent. By burning
us in
public they reinforced the prejudices of all their readers and
assured them
that the prevailing computer paradigm was not challenged and that they
would have to learn and understand nothing new.
To hell too with Rossetto, Metcalfe and Kelly. But my concern is
that out
of snottiness, malice and Schadenfreude, by inflicting these setbacks
and
disgraces to our work, these unspeakable individuals may have
destroyed one
of the few great possibilities the human race ever had: an electronic
publishing network where contents could be freely combined and remixed
under legal copyright, with each portion being purchased from the
original,
and everything deeply linkable and annotatable– while being changed.
All
this works in the Xanadu and Transliterature designs.
I have no choice but to fight on.
Transliterature is announced as an open source project, but there's no
schedule and no money and no people. The Oxford Internet Institute has
provided a wonderful breathing-space in which to pull together this
work,
but mundane pressures will shortly slow me down. This may not be
finished
in my lifetime. But the important thing is to start.
Thanks partly to Wired, the fascist formats have largely taken over.
But
perhaps this can be D-Day.
Ted Nelson
===THANKS
My nearly two years at the Oxford Internet Institute have
given me time
and breathing space for this work, and Wadham College (Oxford) has
provided
the Fellowship, in both senses, to help me go on. Special thanks to
William Dutton and Dame Stephanie Shirley of the Oxford Internet
Institute,
to Wadham College (Oxford) and Kenneth Woods for supporting my
fellowship
there, to Wendy Hall and the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science
at the University of Southampton for support and inspiration during my
residence in Southampton; to Chris Gutteridge and Stevan Harnad at the
University of Southampton and the EPrints project for adding portion and
context service to the EPrints server, to Helen Ashman and the
Department
of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham for my first office
that had a view of swans. Extreme special thanks to my brilliant,
amiable
and most ingenious collaborator, Andrew Pam of Xanadu Australia.
Thanks to
my many other recent collaborators and well-wishers in the United
Kingdom,
Japan, Finland and France. Thanks to about a hundred alumni and
supporters
of the Xanadu Project, and especially its principal designers Roger
Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart Greene. Thanks to Doug Engelbart for
his
great and enduring inspiration. And thanks most of all to my
collaborator,
fellow traveller and sweetpartner of long standing and patience, Marlene
Mallicoat.
===BIBLIOGRAPHY
Defining book on Project Xanadu: Theodor Holm Nelson,
'Literary Machines'.
1981 and later editions. (Editions since 1985 describe the tumbler
addressing structure of xu88 in some detail; omitted was the secret that
all internal mechanisms are based on tumbler arithmetic, e.g.
rearrangement
by permutation matrices of tumbler spans.)
Peer-reviewed ACM article on the history of the Xanadu project,
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=346033
If you don't have an ACM account,
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html
Peer-reviewed ACM article on transpathic media, TN's "The
heart of
connection: hypermedia unified by transclusion" at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=208344.208353 . See also
Krottmaier,
"Issues of Transclusions," http://coronet.iicm.edu/denis/pubs/
elearn2002b.pdf.
Peer-reviewed British Computer Society article on TN's ZigZag*
nonhierarchical database and software engine,
http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v05/i01/Nelson/
=== LEGACY XANADU SOFTWARE, NOW OPEN SOURCE
Code for referential Xanadu xu88 (now also called "Udanax
Green") is
maintained by Roger Gregory at Udanax.com, and now said to be
working. It
is reported that Jeff Rush has translated it into Python. I look
forward
to merging Transliterature with fully-functional xu88 Xanadu, but who
knows
when.
See discussion of Xanadu principles (especially enfilades) at
xanadu.com/tech/. A good deal of Xanadu documentation will be found at
sunless-sea.org, maintained by Jeff Rush. However, in that
documentation
you may find some confusion between Udanax Green (xu88) and the very
different Udanax Gold (xu92), both being conflated as "Xanadu" without
distinction.
("Udanax Gold" or xu92, the completely different design done
in the
Autodesk period, is not compatible with Transliterature or Xanadu
xu88. It
is considered by some to be of great theoretical interest, but it is
very
very far from working.)
==="ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS" DISCLAIMER
Transliterature is an adaptation and simplification of
referential Xanadu
(xu88), which was designed by Roger Gregory, Mark Miller and Stuart
Greene.
That design was their ingenious fulfillment of the wish list and
specs we
worked out in the Xanadu design summer of 1979.
It is high time they get full credit for the depth and
brilliance of their
full design, which is much deeper than Transliterature.
=== * ABOUT TRADEMARKS
Trademark law offers excellent benefits to the little guy as
well as big
corporations. The following I claim as trademarks for open source
software
to avoid semantic creep: Transliterature, Transquoter, Flowser, LUSTR,
Transcopyright. The following are registered software trademarks for
commercial purposes: Xanadu, ZigZag.
—30•–
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