I mean open systems would be fundamentally in tension with the whole idea of paid, proprietary transclusion that's one of the central pillars of Xanadu right?
Although even in the case of the standard, leaving aside whether this would make Xanadu feasible or not, I'm not sure given Xanadu's history whether it was ever conceived of being "open" in the same way, say HTML is.
There are plenty of standards that are effectively closed and require payment to access and read (see e.g. ISO standards as well as, in the U.S. the state of Georgia very nearly getting away with putting legally-binding annotations behind a paywall: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/supreme-court-ru...). I think Xanadu's philosophy would've lent it to a similar approach, independent of what this would mean for its survival.
> Are you happy with the process for developing and improving HTML? Do you feel that the results are of high quality? Do you think that you've had sufficient input? [...]
> In order to influence ISO standards you need only be recognized as an expert in your country. Unless your country is an oligarchy or dictatorship, this will cost you very little or nothing at all [...]
[1]: https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/in... (beware comically broken page on mobile)
[2]: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/199710/msg00189.html
IEEE Article and video about "Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past":
https://spectrum.ieee.org/video/geek-life/profiles/ted-nelso...
HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16222520
My comment and quotes from the DDJ interview of James Clark, "The Triumph of Simplicity":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227249
In the ideal world we would all be using s-expressions and Lisp, but now XML and JSON fill the need of language-independent data formats.
>Not trying to defend XSLT (which I find to be a mixed bag), but you're aware that it's precursor was DSSSL (Scheme), with pretty much a one-to-one correspondence of language constructs and symbol names, aren't you?
The mighty programmer James Clark wrote the de-facto reference SGML parser and DSSSL implementation, was technical lead of the XML working group, and also helped design and implement XSLT and XPath (not to mention expat, Trex / RELAX NG, etc)! It was totally flexible and incredibly powerful, but massively complicated, and you had to know scheme, which blew a lot of people's minds. But the major factor that killed SGML and DSSSL was the emergence of HTML, XML and XSLT, which were orders of magnitude simpler.
James Clark:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer)
There's a wonderful DDJ interview with James Clark called "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML" where he explains how a standard has failed if everyone just uses the reference implementation, because the point of a standard is to be crisp and simple enough that many different implementations can interoperate perfectly.
A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML:
http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-o...
I think it's safe to say that SGML and DSSSL fell short of that sought-after simplicity, and XML and XSLT were the answer to that.
"The standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations." -James Clark
My (completely imaginary) impression of the XSLT committee is that there must have been representatives of several different programming languages (Lisp, Prolog, C++, RPG, Brainfuck, etc) sitting around the conference table facing off with each other, and each managed to get a caricature of their language's cliche cool programming technique hammered into XSLT, but without the other context and support it needed to actually be useful. So nobody was happy!
Then Microsoft came out with MSXML, with an XSL processor that let you include <script> tags in your XSLT documents to do all kinds of magic stuff by dynamically accessing the DOM and performing arbitrary computation (in VBScript, JavaScript, C#, or any IScriptingEngine compatible language). Once you hit a wall with XSLT you could drop down to JavaScript and actually get some work done. But after you got used to manipulating the DOM in JavaScript with XPath, you being to wonder what you ever needed XSLT for in the first place, and why you don't just write a nice flexible XML transformation library in JavaScript, and forget about XSLT.
XSLT Stylesheet Scripting Using <msxsl:script>:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/data/xml/xs...
Excerpts from the DDJ interview (it's fascinating -- read the whole thing!):
>DDJ: You're well known for writing very good reference implementations for SGML and XML Standards. How important is it for these reference implementations to be good implementations as opposed to just something that works?
>JC: Having a reference implementation that's too good can actually be a negative in some ways.
>DDJ: Why is that?
>JC: Well, because it discourages other people from implementing it. If you've got a standard, and you have only one real implementation, then you might as well not have bothered having a standard. You could have just defined the language by its implementation. The point of standards is that you can have multiple implementations, and they can all interoperate.
>You want to make the standard sufficiently easy to implement so that it's not so much work to do an implementation that people are discouraged by the presence of a good reference implementation from doing their own implementation.
>DDJ: Is that necessarily a bad thing? If you have a single implementation that's good enough so that other people don't feel like they have to write another implementation, don't you achieve what you want with a standard in that all implementations — in this case, there's only one of them — work the same?
>JC: For any standard that's really useful, there are different kinds of usage scenarios and different classes of users, and you can't have one implementation that fits all. Take SGML, for example. Sometimes you want a really heavy-weight implementation that does validation and provides lots of information about a document. Sometimes you'd like a much lighter weight implementation that just runs as fast as possible, doesn't validate, and doesn't provide much information about a document apart from elements and attributes and data. But because it's so much work to write an SGML parser, you end up having one SGML parser that supports everything needed for a huge variety of applications, which makes it a lot more complicated. It would be much nicer if you had one SGML parser that is perfect for this application, and another SGML parser that is perfect for this other application. To make that possible, the standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations.
>DDJ: Is there any markup software out there that you like to use and that you haven't written yourself?
>JC: The software I probably use most often that I haven't written myself is Microsoft's XML parser and XSLT implementation. Their current version does a pretty credible job of doing both XML and XSLT. It's remarkable, really. If you said, back when I was doing SGML and DSSSL, that one day, you'd find as a standard part of Windows this DLL that did pretty much the same thing as SGML and DSSSL, I'd think you were dreaming. That's one thing I feel very happy about, that this formerly niche thing is now available to everybody.
This is still pretty nascent distinction I'm thinking of but I think there's at least 2 types of innovators.
Those that can delegate and cede the process of new ideas and fundamental control and know others will act in good faith and shepherd things to the finish line. Examples are TBL and Torvalds, who may be a tough cookie, but isn't involved in everything; IBM, Nvidia and Google do their thing.
Then there is the other kind. There's not many kind words for these folks. They'll never delegate creativity or control, only tasks.
Xanadu ideally, and at a previous time in actual documents, was envisioned as a proprietary publishing empire, you know as if you'd get a mythical Alan Kay Xanadu Dynabook that'd have all the dreams manifest.
Sometimes these people are also really good and can make it happen, like Steve Jobs. But most of the time, they aren't good at something and not willing to cede it, something critical. Other times people aren't willing to do the work, it's too much of a barrier.
These types of people can succeed marvelously in smaller ideas. The perfectionist restaurant where the all star chef controls everything is basically every michelin star restaurant explained.
Same goes for great movies or music. Michael Jackson and Hitchcock were supposedly like this.
It's just a harder model to make work for big ideas. So much harder it usually just can't be done.
I really want a Nelson system but unless he can move himself to the TBL column and give way on crucial tenants, I really don't see it happening and having large adoption.
These personality types seem distrustful of people like me, as if I'm going to steal their valor. I have invariably failed to explain that no, I want them to succeed, give me 0 dollars and 0 credit.
I usually recommend don't even cede to me, but to some other, brilliant person, that I have no connection with. However, that's not compatible with their model of human motivation so their distrust becomes further entrenched, usually with me AND the recommendation. It's ugly.
I don't know how to work with these brilliant people.
For instance, Ted's micropayment system is essentially what Eich achieved using his BAT cryptocurrency in the Brave browser. He ceded massive controls to make it happen. Now places like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are accepting BATs.
A true Nelsonite would debate with me how Eich's BATs are no true Scotsman, and that's the problem. They're close enough damn it, let it go. You aren't always going to get a bull's-eye on the dart board of life. Make it a stepping stone, a pipeline to the true life, whatever, just don't dismiss the good as the enemy of the perfect. I'm sure the first iphone and first ipod wasn't all of Steve's ideas made manifest. Heck, if he didn't have a perfect favorable storm with Microsoft floating Apple during their late 90s antitrust, none of Apple's second spring would've happened either.
Nelson's ideas work, that's what TBL proved with the w3, he just needs to structure them for success.