Ted Nelson on how the web got it all wrong (but we can fix it)
Ted Nelson was giving a Google Tech Talks on January 29, 2007. I’m not going to comment, I haven’t sent it yet. But Xanadu, come on! It’s the biggest return since Duke Forever!
Everyone wants to improve on Web structure, but few see how stuck it is– the browser … all » limits what can be seen, and the one-way embedded links limit connectivity. I still want to implement the original hypertext concept from the sixties and seventies. Politics and paradigms, not possibility, have held it back.
Google Video page on Transclusion: Fixing Electronic Literature by Ted Nelson on 2007/01/29
Transclusion-based hypertext has great promise, fulfilling (I believe) all the things people want that the Web cannot do.
But to build a clean system around transclusion, we do not embed, since that brings inappropriate markup and links to new contexts.
Most importantly, we must have editability with persistent addresses– which means non-breaking stable addresses for every element. Each new version is distributed as pointers to stabilized content. We do our canonical editing and distribution via EDL (Edit Decision List, a Hollywood concept); thus content addresses never change, and links need not break.
This is highly general, not just for text. It directly gives us a universal format for all media and their combinations, including multitrack texts, movies and audio.
Naturally, Google can play a key part in all this. As transclusive formats start deploying (including browser-based transclusive formats), a Google listing of a document can point also to a document’s content sources. (To say nothing of other possible roles for Google in transdelivery and brokering.)
People accuse me of wanting “perfection.” No, I want the other 90% of hypertext that the Web in its present form cannot deliver.
I am showing prototypes of a client-based viewer and editor in 3D.
