In this section:
· Who is Ted Nelson? · What is Xanadu? ·
· Links ·
Ted Nelson coined the word "hypertext" in 1965 and conceptualized "Xanadu" in 1981,
as a central, pay-per-document hypertext database of all written information.
From: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~wwwbtb/book/chap1/htx_hist.html
Theodor Holm Nelson, a writer, film-maker, and software designer, conceived the idea of Xanadu in 1981.
In his own words, "explaining it quickly":
1. Xanadu is a system for the network sale of documents with automatic royalty on every byte.
2. The transclusion feature allows quotation of fragments of any size with royalty to the original publisher.
3. This is an implementation of a connected literature.
4. It is a system for a point-and-click universe.
5. This is a completely interactive docuverse.
Andrew Pam, in his Where World Wide Web Went Wrong article explains transclusion as: "Transclusion" is a term introduced by Ted Nelson to define virtual inclusion, the process of including something by reference rather than by copying. This is fundamental to the Xanadu designs; originally transclusions were implemented using hyperlinks, but it was later discovered that in fact hyperlinks could be implemented using transclusions! Transclusions permit storage efficiency for multiple reasonably similar documents, such as those generated by versions and alternates as discussed above.
In the Xanadu scheme, a universal document database (docuverse), would allow addressing of any substring of any document from any other document. "This requires an even stronger addressing scheme than the Universal Resource Locators used in the World-Wide Web."
Additionally, Xanadu would permanently keep every version of every document, thereby eliminating the possibility of a broken link and the ever-so-familiar 404-Document Not Found error. Xanadu would only maintain the current version of the document in its entirety. The previous versions could then be dynamically reconstructed from the current version through a very sophisticated versioning system which would keep track of modifications made to each generation of the document.
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan, Xanadu is a "magic place of literary memory" where nothing is ever forgotten.
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