[johnchristopher]

I am going to be "that guy" but let me quote something from that wired article about Xanadu and Ted Nelson I read every few years:

> [...] Jellinghaus also began to question whether a hypertext revolution required the perfect preservation of all knowledge. He saw the beauty of the Xanadu dream - "How do you codify all the information in the world in a way that is infinitely scalable?" - but he suspected that human society might not benefit from a perfect technological memory. Thinking is based on selection and weeding out; remembering everything is strangely similar to forgetting everything. "Maybe most things that people do shouldn't be remembered," Jellinghaus says. "Maybe forgetting is good."

Regarding your implementation problem regarding things that must be done: why not simply grep txt files and decide on a simple set of symbol (eg: X,*,1,etc.) to put in front of lines that have to be processed later on ?

Revisit those txt files later for a good read and see what comes out ?