(2003-03-02) Nelson Engelbart Smackdown

Mark Bernstein notes old tensions between the Ted Nelson/Intertwingularity and Douglas Engelbart/OutLining camps.

• In the early 1990's, Outliners and stretchtext systems like Guide seemed the wave of the future, and increasing formality appeared to be the natural direction for hypertext...
• As it turned out, Xanadu wasn't utopian; one year we woke up and, there (more or less) it was (World Wide Web). Over the course of the 90's, moreover, the pendulum swung against formality. Outliners disappeared into presentation systems, and then Microsoft killed the software category by giving away MsPowerpoint and outliners were nearly forgotten...
• Just at the moment when Engelbart falls out of these histories, as it happens, the pendulum is swinging back toward Engelbart-style systems. TinderBox and Radio Userland, for example, are each strongly influenced by Engelbart. Tinderbox, with its semi-formal attribute structure and template transclusion, echoes Aquanet and SEPIA, and its rhetoric sometimes recalls NLS/Augment. Radio, like Augment, is all about outlines - and OPML may the first outliner since Augment to support outlines that cross (Transclusion) machines and File System-s. (Gopher did this too; it might be interesting to look at Gopher again....)