User:Tancre/Special Issue 8/Notes from Project Xanadu

The Project Xanadu | Ted Nelson | 1960

A new kind of writing with parallel pages and documents visibly connected.

1970 Xerox PARC > "How can we imitate paper?", conventional electronic documents, Microsoft Word and PDF, imitate paper and emphasize appearence of fonts. First 'modern' interface Alto, limitated by Windows and Macintosh then Linux.

1960 Xanadu project > paper as a prison "How can we IMPROVE on paper?", new screen literature of parallel, interconnected documents. Visible connection between two links as structural part of the writing, generalized way of representing parallel documents and their precise connection (impossibile on OS and web). The web of Tim Berners-Lee (which is a fork of Xanadu project) used the concept of 'hyperlink' from this project (jump-link) leaving out the visible interconnections which makes visible where you are going. Need of a rational and extensible structure behind the visible connection, a way of grouping parallel documents and managing their visible interconnections, that is defined by the data structure. >> Redefine the nature of reading and writing through a radically new media.
1998 Udanax project > release of the code of xanadu

Concepts

• marglinal notes
• multi-parallelism / intercomparison > visual comparison of different version and text to facilitate nonsequential writing
• transclusion > live quotes, connection connected to source, parallel visualization of a page with the origin. Allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents.
• generalized media format (multi format visualization)
• transcopyright > copyright system which allows to mix free and paid content
• hyperlinks
  • deep link or xanalink (original hyperlink) > visual connection to content, possibility of visit another page in parallel
  • jump link (nowdays hyperlink) > jump connection to unknown hyperspace
  • floating link (flink)
• docuverse > global distributed electronic library of interconnected documents. A global metadocument
• tumbler > address of any range of content or link or a set of ranges or links. Set of metadata connected to addresses.
• Enfialde > class of data structures

Working prototypes

• 1999 Ka-Ping Yee - Pyxi, connected to the Xanadu Green server (Roger Gregory)
• 2003 Ian Heath - CosmicBook
• 2007 Adamson Smith - XanaduSpace, 3D [1]
• 2014 Nicholas Levin - OpenXanadu
• 2016 Xanadocs [2]

= Form Ted Nelson

>> Bibliography and links on Monoskop

From Xanadu.com

Xanadu history
Xanalogical Structure
Xanadu model
Transcopyright

Others

1995 Wired magazine's article 'the course of xanadu'
2016 Werner Herzog documentary 'Lo and Behold, Reveries of the connected world'