(2018-04-16) Ohno What People Get Wrong About Xanadu

John Ohno: What people get wrong about Xanadu. Links are separate from documents. They aren’t IN documents. The author of a document doesn’t have any greater authority over links than anybody else — they can create a bunch, and users can choose to apply them or not.

it’s closer to the ‘Rap Genius’ model — arbitrary users make arbitrary connections, annotations, rearrangements. (hypothes.is)

It’s social footnoting. That’s the whole point. It’s for fandoms.

Hypertext is not about an author carefully controlling their brand by creating associations. It’s about a bunch of nerds sharing their own connections and footnotes and doing mashups & remixes of existing text.

People couldn’t use DMCA takedowns to shut down critique, because there’s no grounds, because all of the quotes are getting paid for & the original context is connected to commentary automatically.

any remixing or rearrangment is being done on the client — an argument can be made that derivative works aren’t being distributed so much as instructions on how to modify someone’s personal copy of a piece of media.

It’s stupid to address a document based on a machine, which is why email got rid of routes

which machine a document happened to reside on was never part of addressing on Xanadu. Versions currently in development have lost that, using HTTP for file storage. But, at least links and formatting are totally separate from documents. And, at least, you’ve got first-order mechanisms for rearrangement (EDLs, which are just lists of transclusions — assembly instructions for frankensteining new documents from disparate sources.)

None of these things are technically difficult. A full Xanadu-style hypertext system is easier to write than just the HTML parsing component of a modern web browser alone.