Re:Getting to Xanadu
by PaulHoule on Saturday December 08, 2018 @11:52AM
(#18636086)
That "screenshot" showing the two linked documents is actually a terrible example.
It might have made sense in the early 1970s when Gerald Salton was doing text retrieval experiments with punchcards and those two pages of text were about what computers could handle.
In real life if you had a page of text you might have bidirectional hyperlinks to 20 or so paragraphs which might be spread out through a book-sized document or perhaps 10 books.
A demo of that user interface produces an entirely different reaction than that mockup. (eg. "When can I buy it?" as opposed to "Isn't that swell?")
Building an entirely new format and server architecture for text almost might have seemed rational in 1970s when we hadn't even settled over ASCII or EBDIC but today if you can't find the Xanalogical structure that is hidden in plain text, HTML and PDF you are blowing smoke.
It might have made sense in the early 1970s when Gerald Salton was doing text retrieval experiments with punchcards and those two pages of text were about what computers could handle.
In real life if you had a page of text you might have bidirectional hyperlinks to 20 or so paragraphs which might be spread out through a book-sized document or perhaps 10 books.
A demo of that user interface produces an entirely different reaction than that mockup. (eg. "When can I buy it?" as opposed to "Isn't that swell?")
Building an entirely new format and server architecture for text almost might have seemed rational in 1970s when we hadn't even settled over ASCII or EBDIC but today if you can't find the Xanalogical structure that is hidden in plain text, HTML and PDF you are blowing smoke.