If you haven’t been following Ted Nelson on YouTube, you’re missing out. Recently, he’s been posting a series of informational videos on the Xanadu architecture and concepts. Even more recently, he hosted a live Q&A session, taking questions from Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ted Nelson’s Channel<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n What’s Xanadu, you ask? It’s the original concept for a hypertext system, designed well before the web was a gleam in Tim BL’s eye. Nelson himself coined the term ‘hypertext’. It can be hard to wrap your head around a hypertext system not<\/em> based on markup or HTML. For a brief technical overview, check out this article<\/a>, now nearly a decade old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the biggest points of contention between the “current web” and Xanadu is the de-facto security restrictions (such that they are) on browsers with the Same Origin policy<\/a><\/strong>. With several loopholes, once your browser loads a page from xyzzy.com, other content, excluding images and other things, have to be loaded from the same site. [Yes, it’s possible, via preflights, to get around this, but the kind of per-site configuration needed flies against the notion of a global “docuverse”.] In contrast, the central construct of Xanadu is that documents consist of a central list of chunks of content and links to load.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because we’ve lived in a web-wide-world for so long, it’s hard to think clearly about this alternate reality. What role would something like JavaScript play in a Xanadu-docuverse? I haven’t been able to find any detailed studies about how security design on a web-scale Xanadu deployment. What would be the nearest equivalents to cookies or webapps? To web forms (or dare I say, XForms)? To untrusted content surreptitiously leaking personal information? To CSRF<\/a> attacks? To the OWASP<\/a> security checklist?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It seems like Xanadu wants to consist of purely documents, and is less friendly toward other media types, and outright hostile to what we today call webapp technology. This makes for a clean and elegant design, but I can’t help wonder whether it’s also a factor in the takeover of one-ended “jumplinks” as seen in HTML, and the mountain of web architecture that came along with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My gut says that not all hope is lost. Large chunks of web technology, including HTTP, could be hugely useful in a global docuverse. One way or another, the browser ship has sailed, so it would have to work with modern web browsers. So what can we do about the Same-origin problem? How can we design a docuverse on top of today’s web? -m<\/p>\n\n\n\n P.S. I still have the same question from the earlier article: <\/p>\n\n\n\n