Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Ted Nelson's books
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 11/10/1999; 4:42:30 PM Topic: T. Nelson Critique of Embedded Markup Msg #: 12978 (In response to 12960) Prev/Next: 12977 / 12979
Dan Lyke wrote:I've been amazed to follow a few comments in this thread speculating about stuff laid out back in Literary Machines, and had the people commenting read it we could be talking about whether or not it's a good idea, rather than what he meant.
Well, I read it--well over a decade ago now. As others have pointed out, Nelson's work has a maddening habit of going in and out of print and being hard to track down.
Still, even having read Nelson's work, it strikes me that the what-he-meant conversation is relevant. After all, it's all just interpretation--at least until someone gets the Xanadu code running sufficiently well to be able to say "here are the respects in which Xanadu implements these ideas, here are the respects in which it wanted to but doesn't, and here are the respects in which it was never even intended to."
Is someone porting Xanadu to Squeak? Open Source Xanadu is a lot like Open Source Mozilla: a nice gesture, but without buildable, working code, a lot less compelling to a lot of people.
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:28 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.