Xanadu Project Released

[leeand00]

Dear TiddlyWiki Community, 

   I'm not sure if anyone saw this, but the project Xanadu finally launched (50 years later!)  It looks like a diff viewer I once used called Meld, but I'm fairly certain it's a bit more complex than that. It seems to share some common functionality with Tiddlywiki in that it's non-linear and that you can add transclusions as well as links.  The story behind it is quite entertaining as well...see the old wired article on Xanadu.  I'm not going to switch to it anytime soon, but there may be some inspiration to be taken from Xanadu to Tiddlywiki5 developers and plugin developers.  (P.S. I'm not trying to be insulting, 50 years is quite a bit of time for a software development project to go on...I'm just trying to inspire the community about whats been tried before...to see if there's any inspiration that can be taken from Xanadu considering it's shared features).

Thank you, 

    Andrew J. Leer

[Birthe C]

Hi leeand00
Thank you for sending this link. The descriptions are wonderful I haven't laughed so much for a long time.On the other hand I am happy that Tiddlywiki 5 is under rapid development and wonderful already.


Mvh. Birthe

[Alberto Molina]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the link. I gave it a try and it looks very interesting. But I there's still a lot of work to do.

I'm looking forward to see it released (before 2064, I hope).

Alberto

[Jeremy Ruston]

I certainly did see OpenXanadu, and love it. It's brilliantly executed, and feels wonderful to finally have a visceral experience of what Ted Nelson has been talking about for all these years. I've followed Nelson's work for many years (I'm also very interested in his ZZ structure ideas). I was lucky enough to meet Ted Nelson once, just after TiddlyWiki was first launched.

However, I end up feeling that this visual metaphor for transclusion is one of many such metaphors that works nicely in our heads, but doesn't actually make a good user interface. There's too much scrolling up and down the thumbnails to find where the transclusion tunnels go. And in the parts of the document that have complex transclusions the criss-crossing becomes very hard to understand visually.

I feel the same about lines and boxes visualisations; it's clear that many people visualise the relationships between blobs of information in that way, but it really only works in practice if the number of nodes is very small (less than 12 in my experience).

But I think the deeper problem is that zooming out of a long passage of text isn't a good way to visualise its overall structure. It reduces us to using visual features to navigate. So I'd be interested to see some sort of semantic zooming employed, so that the thumbnail view gives me the semantic structure of the document, as well as its visual appearance.

Anyhow, with respect to Xanadu my main thought is that I'd like TiddlyWiki to be a framework where these kinds of visualisations can be explored.

I think Nelson is harsh when he judges the web to be a broken mis-implementation of hypertext. For example, he castigates HTML's one way links. But he ignores the principle of least power (http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/), which is one many ways in which the web tries to align itself with the realities of human behaviour. Rather the point of the web was that when we first heard about it seemed like a breathtakingly shocking oversimplification of hypertext, and then it turned out that the web was much more successful than anything more complex could have been. The asymmetry of linking on the web has emerged as one of its most powerful structures. For example, historically Google have used inbound links as a measure of the importance of a web page. Any more friction in creating a link would weaken the power of that model.

But Nelson's stuff on why computers can do better than just simulating our historical paper artefacts is terrific:

> We foresaw in 1960 that all document work would migrate 

> to the interactive computer screen, so we could write in new ways-- 

> - paper enforces sequence-- we could escape that! 

> - paper documents can't be connected-- we could escape that! 

> - this means a different form of writing 

> - this means a different form of publishing 

> - this means a different document format, 

> to send people and to archive.

Best wishes

Jeremy

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