The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu | Hacker News Reader

The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu

maggieappleton.com

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I now have two reservations (open questions) about Project Xanadu.

Centralization

I believe but cannot yet prove that (durable) two-way links require some kind of central authority.

I was very slow to appreciate that Nelson always intended for Project Xanadu to be centralized (authoritative?). Much like Facebook and AOL. Whole onto themselves. Walled gardens.

Being a huge fan of the Xanadu vision (and never understanding the tech or stack), I was disappointed with the Web's one-way links.

Now I see that we dodged a bullet. A suspect that an "open" Web and two-way links are mutually incompatible.

Tumblers

I've always wanted the transclusion feature. But I never fully grokked tumbers, Xanadu's fundamental data structure. I'd done a bit of work with SNMP MIB, which uses OIDs. Honestly, they sucked. But I couldn't think of anything better.

Now I suspect the tumbler approach has been mooted by the advances in version control systems.

I still want something like purple numbers or xpointers. Some kind of "light weight" tumbler. Not to say the tumbler data structure is itself heavy; just the over reliance on tumblers. So something like tumblers, as needed, when they're a value-add. So intra-document tumblers, not inter-document (eg directory, catalog). And definitely not for document management (workflows, version control).

Thanks for reading. I write to understand. (And Xanadu is something I've struggled to understand for decades.) Feedback appreciated.

Central authority is probably necessary if it is an authority on the final word. But I don't think that's as important as it sounds: what's really important is authority on the first word.

A distributed system could use a web of trust where each user claims to be the originator of their work, via PGP signature. At that point "authority" is determined by what user identities you consider trustworthy by including them in your web of trust.

Xanadu transclusion would not work without central authorities either. Under current copyright law a web page with instructions that say "paste chapter 2, paragraph 33 of someone else's book here" is not automatically legal. It may be construed as a derivative work.

Ted wanted to have copyright licensing and retrieval costs squared away so that when you opened an article with a quote from a book in it, you bought the article, you bought just the quote part of the book, something stitched them together into a document you could see, and everyone involved signed away their right to object to such an arrangement.

I suspect the reason why Xanadu wants tumblers is purely because organizing the entire world's knowledge into a single hierarchical number line looks mathematically neat, even though "give me everything in between page 63 of Snow Crash to page 4 of The Lord of The Rings" is not a meaningful question that can be answered. And again, requires a central authority to number catalogs and books so that they can be referenced in this absolutely batshit insane way.

IMHO the biggest problem with Xanadu isn't the technical underpinnings, or the disregard for decentralization. It's the UX design, or lack thereof. Having 10 different documents open with a bunch of transclusions and links drawn between them is at best extremely distracting and at worst not at all usable. There's a reason why "spiderweb of documents tied with red string" is a visual shorthand for conspiracy theories. And, again, all that requires a central authority to be putting in the work of tying red string in between all the documents, because nobody actually bothers doing that when writing documents unless threatened with academic or legal sanctions.

For the last couple of years WonderOS has explored what a return to first principles OS design might look like today and there are definitely parallels to Xanadu with explicit callouts to Hypercard, Vannevar Bush and Engelbert if you explore the Lab Notes from the developer which are very thoughtful.

".... an itemized user environment. The item is an alternative boundary for our digital things which may let us interact with our devices more fluidly, and reflect our thinking more accurately, across our entire personal computing domain."

https://wonderos.org/

Really great, thanks for share.

Appears very much in the spirit of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface [2000]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface

https://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin

As u/chrisweekly alludes to elsethread, Obsidian is a bit like WonderOS.

Could WonderOS be implemented as a "Obsidian as an operating system shell"? That'd be a "leaky abstraction", of course. But there are many precedents.

Sorry, my pre-senile brain isn't quickly recalling the variety of experiments made to run on top of early Windows. Just a list of possibles:

- Norton Commander was ported to Windows, right?

- Assymetrix (Paul Allen's startup focused on actor based programming) did something

- Wasn't there a desktop based on GEM?

Aha. Here's a few more contenders:

List of alternative shells for Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for...

Anyway... WonderOS is terrific. So much work. It's definitely worthy of implementing a prototype.

Please share any future updates. Thanks.

Interesting piece - I hope it gets finished.

Ted Nelson's books Computer Lib / Dream Machines, and Literary Machines are interesting and unconventional, but hard to find now.

As for Xanadu, the classic Wired aricle The Curse of Xanadu [1] is still well worth a read. I'm not sure his vision was something that would have ever succeeded, but he at least posited an alternative to what we have now.

[1] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

Edit to add that I've used the term "rabid prototyping" a few times over the years, and skimming that wired article reminds me where I stole it from.

Nelson has termed The Curse of Xanadu a hatchet job. There is discussion of that article, including links to archived versions of Nelson's responses to it at the c2.com page about it [1].

After an initial period of thinking Xanadu was vapourware, then feeling like the article was an uncharitable hatchet-job, I'm back to thinking it was vapourware. Nelson's responses seemed nit-picky at best, and when I downloaded the prototype/demo they'd made available I simply could not get it to work.

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?TheCurseOfXanadu

I was personally building that demo and expressed these concerns at the time ten years ago. The other person on the project, who was like 17, convinced Ted that my, at the time, 20 years of software development somehow made me malicious and he asked me to not work on it.

So he got what some sniping high school kid can make.

Yes I'm still bitter about it. I don't make broken shit and that shit was broken. I still went to the demo/announcement at Chapman university (Woz was there, that was pretty cool)

The reason Nelson's stuff hasn't gone anywhere is because he's a tyrant persuaded by fools and liars. I wish him the best regardless.

Well that sounds like a major red flag

This isn't for lack of competent people with good intentions.

The only times his ideas succeeded is when he wasn't on the project. Hypercard, WWW... His ideas were in the room but he was not.

There's some deep lessons on how important therapy, interpersonal relationships and good management are there.

This isn't to throw shade. Nobody remembers most brilliant inventors as successful CEOs because they usually aren't. It's a different skillset and you gotta know when to hand over the keys and to whom.

It's not easy and I certainly don't profess expertise.

FWIW, Duff Kurland's post-mortem of Nelson & Xanadu at Autodesk jives with your analysis.

In the spirit of xanadu, would you mind posting a link?

In searching your keywords, I did come across a font of wisdom in the form of "The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience" which contains some chapters on Xanadu and Autodesk's relationship and acquisition - which I've managed to be wholly unaware of despite being a xanadu enthusiast (in so far as buying a couple of Ted's books and watching his videos on youtube counts :)

http://www.worldcolleges.info/sites/default/files/formpig_au... (see ToC, Xanadu on page 416 and elsewhere)

It was a personal conversation. No link, sorry.

From memory, Kurland related that the Xanadu team did one or more complete rewrites, couldn't or wouldn't commit to releasing something (delays), and Autodesk finally lost faith/patience.

Kurland's a great guy. He didn't name names or dog their effort. He was mostly disappointed, because he had also believed in the promise of Xanadu. But that's just my take.

Be sure not to miss the footnote on page 418:

‘Come 1992, the “resources of Autodesk” were still funding “talent of the Xanadu team” which had not, as of that date, produced anything remotely like a production prototype—in fact, nothing as impressive as the 88.1x prototype which existed before Autodesk invested in Xanadu. On August 21, 1992 Autodesk decided to pull the plug and give its interest in Xanadu back to the Xanadudes.’

I think 10 years on that part of the problem is the negative patterns that come with being overly committed and passionate to your own ideas.

You need these people to be audacious and relentless in order to move the ball forward, like say, Richard Stallman. But then you get people that are overly audacious and relentless like say Richard Stallman.

The balance here is to know when to put your foot down and when to take a backseat.

I've got no answers on how to strike that balance. After meeting and listening to John Warnock of Adobe and PostScript earlier this year, I'm convinced that Steve Jobs didn't know how the first time at Apple but then figured out the second.

I also get the feeling that Bezos and Gates learned this the hard way. (Guess where http://relentless.com will take you...)

I don't know if there's an easy way to learn it. If anything I'm way too passive.

> Yes I'm still bitter about it.

It's hard not to be. Been there, been done like that.

Sadly, I have all the financial and business sense of some zooplankton. I'd give a leg to go back in time for a do-over and the other leg to be smart like that.

> somehow made me malicious and he asked me to not work on it.

Something like what you describe happened to me. Not a fun gig, I sympathize.

For whatever it's worth to you, I don't think of myself as easily impressed. I saw Ted give that demo at a small conference around 10 years ago. I was impressed.

Whatever part you played in that, well done, and thank you.

I got to speak with him briefly afterwards, and to say that he had a chip on his shoulder would be putting it too strongly, but there was definitely some kind of an 'edge' there.

It was fine. There's a number of related projects that are all incredibly minor who had similar demos and somehow were also managed by similar personality types. I've worked with many people over the years but somehow they get their own special group.

Sometimes you run into them at SigGraph, they're these emperors where their kingdom is their mind. They have those messy sprawling websites that read like Doc Brown's scrapbook.

It's an archetype I feel certainly adjacent to and fearful of.

Regardless, about 6 months ago I left my job trying to catch up on all the AI craze because I think that might be the missing piece in moving this class of projects to the next step.

It's going slowly, motivation is hard and this is still kind of a moonshot.

The information organization required to make these memex inspired thought navigational systems truly useful was fleeting, subjective, and labor intensive. AI can do that, pretty well actually, and in personal, subjective ways.

VR and AR can as well and I explored that enough to conclude it's too complicated. You can certainly express the dimensionality needed and tune things accordingly but it's too complicated to be useful.

There's a cognitive limit on the amount of dimensionality and complexity that most people can handle.

There are certainly some brilliant people who don't seem bound by these limits but that's not the point here. It's about taking the information that usually only brilliant people have access to and expanding that so that merely average people like myself can gain competence in it as well.

Chat bots are fine but that's not going to get you from 0 to say, abstract algebras, modern quantum physics, or field theory, which I strongly believe should be accessible to say, 40-60% of people motivated enough to learn it and I strongly believe it currently is not because of the cognitive limits I expressed above by the traditional linear instruction methods.

Getting to the next paradigm is something more people should be working on

Turning the Internet into a true learning machine needs more work and hopefully AI can help

The fact that he coined the term hypertext and we saw a far less powerful version than he envisioned released by someone else does make me feel like there may be some unrealized potential, but that’s just naive speculation. Im not actually familiar with Xanadu.

The game "Kentucky Route Zero" has a chapter where you're in a cave with some crazy cave people doing computer research with antiquated hardware and it's called "Xanadu" lol. It took me awhile to catch the real world reference.

"If we wanted to dial up the Xanadu-esque visibility, we could work on showing previews of the whole page and directing people to specific pieces of text within it."

It has been possible to link to specific pieces of text for a while now. For example: https://maggieappleton.com/xanadu-patterns#:~:text=If%20we%2....

We could also link directly to an office in a building by putting a ladder up to the window of a given office, but doing that completely ignores the structure of the building.

If the text changes, the link breaks.

If the server goes away, the link breaks.

When you click the link, you no longer see the prior page, your context breaks.

This is all about persistently enabling side by side viewing.

If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing. That sound like a really hard problem to handle if you are not in control of both sides.

> If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing

If the literal text changes, and the link to the specific piece of text breaks because the link is just the words. But what if the change to the text is fixing a typo, or changing 'he' to 'they'? Nelson's vision was not about linking to text, it was about linking ideas. See https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800197.806036

Ted Nelson himself has made a video series on Xanadu that is worth watching. The first episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac

That is a pretty low number of views for something like this project.

Collaborated with Ted on Zigzag.

Gzz - the open source finnish-developed Zigzag port - had incredible views like MindSundew. It was brilliant.

The project failed when Ted wouldn't commit to going open source.

It's a shame the project is dead now, because it solves problems like 2-way links. Using cursors which can 'sit' on a cell and disconnect when done.

https://gzigzag.sourceforge.net/

Great article so far, even if just examined for its prose:

> One feels like the dinner guest who has stumbled into a raging martial argument over unwashed tea towels. You don't dare ask for context.

HyperTIES was a hypermedia system designed by Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

HyperTIES was certainly inspire by Ted's ideas, but a totally different design and focus on usability and easy browsing and authoring, and also (with the NeWS version) runtime extensibility and scriptability.

Every HyperTIES article had a short definition summarizing its contents, and single clicking on a link would show that definition at the bottom of the screen without leaving the current context. Double clicking followed the link, and a stroking gesture left or right with a pie menu would open the link up in different windows.

I've written about it before and transcluded the discussion and links into this "HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News":

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

>I linked to a brilliant video by Ted Nelson about his life’s work, and transcribed his most important points (it took him a lifetime to know what to say on the video, so it was well worth my time transcribing what he had to say, to save other people their own time), and then I went onto writing about how HyperTIES applied those ideas, and added concepts like pie menus, definition previews (sorely missing from the web: a way to read the definition of a link destination without actually following the link and losing your context), applets, emacs based authoring, etc.

>It’s ironic that the web is still so primitive that I had to perform a lot of transclusion myself by hand in order to explain the idea of Transclusion that has been around so long, which Ted Nelson has always thought should be built in and automatic, not something you have to do laboriously by hand.

Here's a video of HyperTIES and pie menus on NeWS:

Ben Shneiderman shows the Hubble Space Telescope demo on a Sun Workstation running NeWS:

https://youtu.be/1uyO-xUTt6Y?t=760

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM

Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg

Maybe worth mentioning that Obsidian has transclusion and hover previews (and bidirectional links), with intuitive UX; I use these features every day. Granted, the indexed content is mostly just the static files on my local filesystem....

Loads of Ted stuff at https://archive.org/details/tednelsonarchive?page=2&sort=-we...

> The idea of the bi-directional link goes back to 1945 when Vannevar Bush dreamed up the Memex machine

Ponder that.

It does feel that in 2023 (= the remote future) the ambition to explore the full phase space of digital technology has flatlined in the face of oppressive "reality". False representations, enshittification, exploitation, dependency instead of bold visions of empowerment and augmentation.

Yet future generations might revisit these visions, implement them in non-conforming software and reap the benefits that were denied to us. Thus documenting them in detail acts like these seed banks in the Arctic.

Does Maggie only write her essays as a draft to know if it's worth finishing based on feedback and view counts?

She does something that can happen in a medium entirely unlike the printed word: she publishes what she has, marks it according to what state its in.

https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

There is also a great in depth video on her Tana setup here:

https://help.tana.inc/use-cases/tana-tour-with-maggie-applet...

surprisingly mobile wasn’t mentioned here. one of the biggest changes has been the shrinking of screen space along with higher resolutions.

old paradigms don’t factor that in and thus continue to remain only of academic importance.

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