Hyperworlds – Web Replacement Projects

Regarding "No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget" - I take photos of things all the time of things precisely so I can forget them - I take pictures of gates closed on farmland, electrical items switched off etc. I never look at these pictures again - but the simple act of taking the picture means I don't fret about them afterwards....

This seems to mostly be about Xanadu, which I've heard of in passing before but never really looked into. Some of the features sound nice (version control, content-addressing), some are confusing or undesirable (some mechanism to avoid sharing copyright-protected content?, backlinking, micropayments?). The screenshots of what I presume are Xanadu browsing in action look more like schizophrenic corkboarding than a useful document format, with the emphasis placed more on tracing the provenance of summarized or quoted text than on presenting something readable. Perhaps this style comes more naturally to one more familiar with working in academia and reading/writing papers in that sphere. Being a document distribution system, I don't think Xanadu competes with or is even in the same category as The Web, which as we all know, is an application distribution platform and runtime first and foremost.

Ah, good old Ted Nelson. His "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" captivated and inspired me as a counterculture kid in the '70s, and played a big part in me becoming a graphics nerd today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines)

"Everything is deeply intertwingled."

Worth noting that this appears to be pretty old. The code follows 90s conventions, it mentions things being nascent that are now quite established (like Wikipedia), and other little yellow flags.

Also, geegaws?

If I had to guess, I'd say this is twenty years old.

Current web issues IMVHO are:

- it's not personal, yes we can save much contents, but it's not that manageable nor can be evolved much easier personally, we need a textual web, where anyone can grab text, store it locally naturally, change it as they wish. The "app" part should be just APIs and UIs;

- it's not immediate for anyone, yes we can buy a domain name, it's pretty cheap in most cases, we can use a ready made static website generator, but we do miss the most important part: IPv6 with a static global per host, so we can made OUR OWN WEB with our own friends;

- it's isolated, we have the modern web and WebVMs improperly named browsers for legacy reason, then we have desktops that act more like WebVM bootloaders than classic connected desktops, than some local apps, that tend to be limited and limiting. We need INTERNET much more than the web.

We need RSS for anything, with modern feedreader and a spread culture that content aggregation is a personal thing. We need easy to import data, pure natural language text and numerical data, so for instance if we go to our Amazon profile we can see a feed of all our purchase we can import in our reader, piping from it to our favorite financial software that also import other feeds from our banks/cards etc to make automation easy for things we can automate. We need data ownership, local iron in a classic desktop model.

May I suggest that this quite interesting content will confuse readers that do no come with some context IMHO, It would be much more approachable if it started with the section "What is wrong with the World Wide Web?" ?

Also, you are casting a very wide net, is this section really necessary, and I quote:

""" Java - versatile, cross-platform, but difficult to learn. It hasn't lived up to all the hype that originally surrounded it, but is still important for many things. """

less is more!

Sounds like they want:

1. a DOM system with commit history and git blame per node.

2. link preview like on Wikipedia

I have thought about writing a DOM alternative in rust. The biggest change is that it would return static data structures in a format of a users choice (yaml, json, xml, csv) and not JavaScript objects. Another thing I would do is eliminate most node types so there are only: document, element, element property, and text except text nodes would not return unless each given area of text contains more than 0 non white space characters and the list of white space characters would be expansive similar to the space switch in JavaScript regular expressions.

I remember listening to a pitch about Xanadu around 2010 or 2011.

One of the major, major issues that the presenter (don't remember the name) had is that features like two-way linking only work if the entire system is centralized. Yet, to "replace" the world-wide-web, the system has to be decentralized, or otherwise encumbered with a lot of the problems of blockchain. (IE, blockchain protocols require significantly more politics to update than HTTP.)

I very quickly stopped taking the presenter seriously; and I think other people had a similar sentiment.

Seems misguided. The real problem with the internet is that large corporations are allowed to have a presence on it. Google for example, should be completely banned from the internet.

When was this written? Is it still being maintained? The page history at the Wayback Machine [1] suggests that it has been mostly static for well more than a decade.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/changes/http://hyperworlds.org

I've noticed a lot lately, that sites, projects, even big projects, don't have an easy to find "TL;DR", an "elevator pitch", right at the top of the page.

Most of the time I scroll, it looks like something that might be interesting, but it takes too much effort to figure out, so move on. There is so much content on the web now, these efforts need to put little bit more into the marketing if they want attention.

I'm sure scrolling down maybe it is discernable, but not really obvious.

Or maybe this is just so high concept that a short pitch can't explain it?

So what is this about?

This isn't the first time I've come across this.

I think it's more than 20 years old.

This is really hard to follow.. It gives off some TempleOS vibes.. I agree in principle the WWW has some significant shortcomings and there could be some better way to think about it. It will require some outside the box thinking but this is really hard to follow cognitively.

> What Xanadu has that others don't:

> When responding to any argument (for or against something), you will be able to comment on each and every relevant sentence. The document you are commenting on will automatically link to your analysis. Whether readers of the document see your comments or not is up to them. They will have filtering tools to include or exclude whoever they want. That is their decision to make. Thus every possible viewpoint can be heard and can cross-comment on each other as much as desired.

This could be an extension of Twitters behavior, to link your analysis directly into other peoples document.. And we all know what great social collaboration happens on Twitter ..

Is WWW perfect? No.

Did it fulfil original goals beyond expectations? Yes.

Is it going to be replace with something else? Looks like it.

Will that be Xanadu? No.