Xanadu

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Ted Nelson, Literary Machines

"By hypertext I mean nonsequential writing - text that branches and allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen."

Ted Nelson, The Xanadu Project

The Xanadu ideal is to model and enact exactly a new world that users would want and need if they realized it was possible. The most general statement of the Xanadu paradigm is this: the purpose of computers is tracking connections. A new computer world must be created built around explicit connection. Great efforts must be made toward this end.

The present computer world is built on crude traditional models: hierarchy (believed by some to be synonymous with "structure"); paper analogies, machine analogies, spatial analogies; a crude model of time and backtracking. Older computer methods have great unseen drawbacks, pushing huge problems out into users' laps. Users' needs are ill-addressed by the paradigm of hierarchical files and their inability to deal with non-overlap.

We need instead a rational representation of structure-- from computer mechanisms to electronic literature-- around the representation of all connection, rather than on false approximations (eg copying). This includes a different approach to files (making their contents more streamlike). Most important, it means system-maintained connections in vast quantities.

The objectives are: the escape from paper, finding the best ways to support human thought and creativity-- building on a sophisticated knowledge of complex documents, not building up from the simplest implementation of the simplest documents. The search is for an orderly, fast-evolving, fast-accumulating universe of electronic documents, not modelled to paper, and showing detailed relations among documents and versions, including overlap and commonality.