[majormajor]

> One of the key points of Ted Nelson's research is that much of the writing process is re-arranging, or recombining, individual pieces (text, images, ...) into a bigger whole. In some sense, hypertext provides support for fine-grained modularized writing. It provides mechanisms and structures for combination and recombination. But this requires a "common" hypertext structure that can be easily and conveniently viewed, manipulated and "shared" between applications. Because this form of editing is so fundamental, it should be part of an operating system and an easily accessible "affordance".

Here's where I'm stuck:

Hypertext - whether on the web or just on a local machine - can't solve the UX problem of this on its own, though. People can re-arrange contents in a hypertext doc, recombine pieces of it... but mostly through the same cut-and-paste way they'd do it in Microsoft Word 95.

The web adds an abstraction of "cut and paste just the link or tag that points to an external resource to embed instead making a fresh copy of the whole thing" but all that does is add in those new problems of stale links, etc.

So compared to a single-player Word doc, or even a "always copy by value" shared-Google-doc world that reduces the problems of dead external embeds, what does hypertext give me as a way of making rearranging things easier? Collapsible tags? But in a GUI editor the ability to select and move individual nodes can be implemented regardless of the backend file format anyway.

TLDR: I haven't seen an compelling-to-me-in-2023 demo of how this system should work, doing things that Google docs today can't that avoids link-rot problems and such, to think that the issue is on the document format instead of user tools interface side.

[patterns]

Yes, I agree a demo would be good.

I have to catch some sleep, but I will address your questions as good as I can later. In the meanwhile, you might want to take a look at how Xanadu addresses the problems of stale links, and maybe some of your other questions will be answered.

[1] https://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html

Also, I highly recommend reading Nelson's 1965 ACM paper I mentioned to better understand the problems hypertext tries to solve and the limitations of classical word processing (which also expands to Google Docs).

[majormajor]

Thanks, though I think even in these docs there are some early on concepts I just don't find convincing. Such as in the Xanadu doc, the Software Philosophy short version being a recomposed copy of live text from the long version. If I'm following their goals, they want live cross-editing through their "transpointing windows" - I really really don't, personally. I picture three docs, A, B, and C which is a summary composite of things pulled from A & B - C will still need its own manual curation and updating if A and B are changed to remain legible, flowing, and meaningful, and I'd rather have a stale doc than a garbled one.

The intro of the Nelson paper/Memex discussion is similarly alien to me. I don't think it's human-shaped, at least not for me. The upkeep to use it properly seems like more work than I would get back in value out. It's a little too artifact-focused and not process/behavior focused, IMO?

[patterns]

>I picture three docs, A, B, and C which is a summary composite of things pulled from A & B - C will still need its own manual curation and updating if A and B are changed to remain legible, flowing, and meaningful, and I'd rather have a stale doc than a garbled one.

I think I see what you mean. Garbling, as you mention it, is actually what Xanadu is supposed to prevent. The problem is that it is not explicitely mentioned that a document/version (a collection of pointers to immutable content) should also be an addressable entity (an part of the "grand address space") and must not change, once it has been published to the database. In particular, if a link, e.g., a comment, is made to a text appearing in a document/version, the link must, in addition to the content addresses, also contain the address of that document/version (In Fig. 13. [1] that is clearly not the case and I think that's a serious flaw).

This way, everything that document C refers to - and is presented - is at the time it was when the composition was made. How revisions are managed is an orthogonal (and important) problem, but with the scheme above we lose no information about the provenance of a composition and can use that information for more diligent curation.

[1] https://xanadu.com.au/ted/XUsurvey/xuDation.html

[patterns]

I understand. I think your last objection is very valid and perhaps needs far more consideration.

Anyway, I have limited computer access at the moment, but maybe you find the following response I wrote in the meanwhile useful. Ill get back to you.

---

Some remarks that hopefully answer your question:

The Memex was specifically designed as a supplement to memory. As Bush explains in lengthy detail, it is designed to support associative thinking. I think it's best to compare the Memex not to a writing device, but more to a loom. A user would use a Memex to weave connections between records, recall findings by interactively following trails and present them to others. Others understand our conclusions by retracing the our thought patterns. In some sense, the Memex is a bit like a memory pantograph.

Mathematically, what Bush did is to construct a homomorphism to our brain. I think it is important to realize that, when we construct machines like the Memex or try to understand many research efforts behind hypertext. Somewhere in Linda Barnett's historical review, she mentions that hypertext is an attempt to capture the structure of thought.

What differentiates most word processing from a hypertext processor are the underlying structures and operations and ultimately, how they are reflected by the user-interface. The user interfaces and experiences may of course vary greatly in detail, but by large the augmented (and missing!) core capabilities will be the same. For example, one can use a word processor to emulate hypertext activities via cut and paste, but the supporting structure for "loom-like" workflows are missing (meaning bad user-experience), and there will be a loss of information, because there are no connections, no explicitely recorded structure, that a user can interactively and instantly retrace (speed and effort matter greatly here!), since everything has been collapsed to a single body of text. The same goes for annotations, or side trails that have no structure to be hanged onto and have to be put into margins, footnotes or various other implicit structural encodings.

Hypertext links, at least how Ted Nelson conceptualizes them, are applicative. They are not embedded markup elements like in HTML. In Xanadu, a document (also called version) is a collection of pointers and nothing more. The actual content (text, images) and the documents, i.e., the pointer collections, are stored in a database, called the docuverse. Each content is atomic and has a globally unique address. The solution to broken links is a bit radical: Nothing may be deleted from the global database. In other Hypertext systems, such as Hyper-G (later called Hyperwave), content may be deleted and link integrity is ensured by a centralized link server. (If I am not mistaken, the centralized nature of Hyper-G and the resulting scalability problem was its downfall when the Web came). Today, we have plenty of reliable database technologies and the tools for building reliable distributed systems are much, much better, so I think that a distributed, scalable version of Ted Nelson's docuverse scheme can be done, if there is enough interest.

How a document is composed and presented, is entirely up to the viewer. A document is only a collection of pointers and does not contain any instructions for layouting or presenting, though one can address this problem by linking to a layouting document. However, the important point is that processing of documents should be uniform. File formats such as PDF (and HTML!) are the exact opposite of this approach. I don't think that different formats for multimedia content can be entirely avoided, but when it comes to the composition of content there should be only one "format" (or at least very very simple ones).

I hope this answers some of your questions.