(2021-12-20) Appleton The Pattern Language Of Project Xanadu

Maggie Appleton: The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu. Ted Nelson hoped Xanadu would be a medium for “serious electronic literature" – a paradigm shift that would free us from the material constraints of paper. His vision was the first to meaningfully consider how storing information in digital bits could reconfigure the way we read, write, cite, and share words. (Media Inventor)

historical skirmishes and financial flops are also the least interesting thing about Xanadu. The most interesting part is its Pattern Language.

Taken as a collection of design patterns, Xanadu's documentation suggests solutions to some of the hypertextual problems we're wrestling with today

Xanadu became a sad parable, when it should have been a piece of speculative design. A set of seeds scattered into the wind for other people to pick up and plant, rather than the patent-happy industrial farming conglomerate it tried to grow into.

A number of Xanadu's design patterns are showing up in modern manifestations (Digital Garden)

1. Visible Links

Nelson's answer to jump links are visible links – links that show you the full context of where you're headed

In lieu of Xanadoc links, the modern web has landed on some fairly decent solutions to this issue: hover previews and unfurls.

Similar to hover previews, unfurls are the preview cards that automagically appear when you paste a link into Twitter, Facebook, Notion, Miro, or any other richly-featured web app

This system is powered by the Open Graph Protocol which Facebook introduced in 2010

2. Parallel Documents

parallel documents arranged side-by-side

see quotations in their original context

Ideally our digital mediums would lean into our ability to survey a large visual field. But the limitations of LCD screen sizes lead to some unsatisfying compromises. Instead, we end up squishing columns of documents onto our tiny screens.

Arranging two windows side-by-side doesn't properly solve this problem. We can't select things from from one window and drag them into the next. The two windows don't know about each other and usually can't interact.

Draft in Progress: The quality of writing below this point is haphazard, disjointed, and nonsensical. It's probably a good idea to come back later.

3. Transpointing Windows

4. Transclusion

5. Bi-Directional Links

6. Version Control

7. Modular Text Blocks

While the idea of a webpage has evolved far beyond it's original idea, we still construct, connect, and navigate websites at the page level.

Blocks construct documents

Explosion of note-taking apps using a block-first approach: Roam, Innos, Clover, Craft, Kosmik

8. Stable, Universal Addresses

9. Annotation

10. Multiple Views and Spatial Arrangements

11. Micropayments

The original Xanadu vision was ambitious. Unreasonably ambitious. The above feature list is a small selection.
Perhaps you sense the problem.
Solving all the things all at once gets tricky.

People are building Xanadu without knowing what Xanadu is.
Which is the essence of a good pattern language; true patterns evolve naturally within systems, and are found rather than crafted.