Would the last person to leave the box, please shut off the servers? While doing something this morning that I have not done in a while—unmeditated surfing— I ran across the website of Ted Nelson, the grandfather, as it were, of the web. And like many grandfathers, he is a tad bit cranky about his offspring.
Hypertext, as suddenly adapted to the Internet by Berners-Lee and then Andreessen, is still the paper model! Its long rectangular sheets, aptly called “pages”, can be escaped only by one-way links. There can be no marginal notes. There can be no annotation (at least not in the deep structure). The Web is the same four-walled prison of paper as the Mac and the Windows PC, with the least possible concession to nonsequential writing (“nonsequential writing” was my original 1965 definition of hypertext) that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly have made. Whereas the Xanadu Project, our original design which was beaten out by the Web, was largely based on two-way links by which anyone could annotate anything. (And by which thoughts could branch sideways without hitting walls.)
Even stranger is the “browser” concept. Think of it—a serial view of a parallel universe! Trying to comprehend the large-scale structure of connected Web pages is like trying to look at the night sky (at least, in places that stars are still visible) through a soda straw. Yet people are used to this sequential “browser”; by now it seems natural; and now this “browser” is perhaps more standard than the structures it views and the changing protocols that show them.
I feel a certain amount of guilt over this. I believe it was in 1968 that I presented the full 2-way Xanadu design to a university group, and they dismissed it as “raving”; whereupon I dumbed it down to 1-way links and only one visible window. When they asked how the user would navigate, I suggested a backtrackable stack of recently visited addresses. I believe that this dumbdown, through the various pathways of projects imitating one another, became today’s general design, and I am truly sorry for my role in it.
[Theodor Holm Nelson, 1999, Way Out of the Box]
OK, well, at least I know who to blame now for my paper prison. Even better reading is why he does not buy in to the web: in plain text here, but containing XML entities. Now, where did I put those URLs of neo-luddite websites? [via Bob Seitz' WebSeitzWiki]
[Addendum 11/29/03: Further googling has revealed this aging Wired article, The Curse of Xanadu, on Nelson, Xanadu, and their respective histories, which Nelson considered a hatchet job and answered with his own letter to the editor. There's also a chapter on Xanadu and the web in an online history of the internet and the web. Via the C2 Wiki and Google.]
Posted by jim at November 28, 2003 11:54 AM
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My first introduction to the idea of hypertext came from reading and old copy of Ted Nelson's book Computer Lib / Dream Machines.
To get a sense of Nelson as both revolutionary and utopian, you couldn't do much better than to check out the front and back page covers of this famous book.
Posted by: John Hardy on December 1, 2003 08:31 PMSo was mine, too, John. I remember I had to venture into Cal's School of Library Science's library to find it, too. It wasn't with all the other computer books over in Math/CS or Engineering. Xanadu was a great idea, like Mimex before it, but its various implementations fell short. And, that's not to say it was Nelson's fault. I was just struck by his whole sour grapes attitude towards an industry and a phenomenon that he spawned. But, hey, he can feel like anything he wants to.
Posted by: jim on December 2, 2003 06:25 AMYeah, it's interesting. I did a similar search a few years back of the "whatever happened to Ted Nelson" variety and was surprised to find him whining in the backblocks rather than being right in the thick of it, engaging with the standards and the W3C directly. At least the Internet and the WWW is about open standards, not some closed world of a software company.
Speaking on Autodesk, have you read Rudy Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants? It's basically an allegory about Rucker's own time there and its evil genius founder and hacker extraordinaire John Walker (also mentioned briefly in this week's NTK).
It's a good geek read, Rucker's best IMO.
I'd read it years ago and enjoyed it. Now I'll have to look over it with a new eye.
Posted by: jim on December 2, 2003 04:07 PM
