One thing to keep in mind is that Project Xanadu predates the web by a decade or so. Whereas the web settled on simple unidirectional links embedded in linear text documents, Ted Nelson's Xanadu was aiming for bidirectional transclusion and nonlinear documents ("zippered lists").

Reading old papers from Nelson, Engelbart, or Bush is a lot of fun, though it can sometimes take a little work to get into a pre-internet headspace. I don't read very many authors these days who are attempting to rethink fundamental computer interface concepts like that, though there are a few.

Xanadu was the original project in which the term "hypertext" was coined. It's the primary influence over all hypertext things, including HTML. Its intended use was "directly embedded documents" instead of clicking through links. So, this web site just revives that original idea. I agree that its novelty over web model is still questionable, but that's how significant it is.

I would argue that memex is the primary influence over all hypertext things. The concept was around before Xanadu.

You're right, I hadn't thought about Memex, so, the concept was there, but still, Ted Nelson coined the term.

>It's the primary influence over all hypertext things, including HTML

Is it? Was Tim Berners-Lee influences by Project Xanadu? Was he aware at all?

He was certainly influenced by Ted Nelson and I’d be shocked if he had no awareness of this. He’d have to have been completely naive about the field he was working in, and I don’t think he was naive.

You can check yourself by reading TBL's first WWW site [1].

In essence, Ted Nelson (and Vannevar Bush) are referenced in the "History" section, and also for coining the term "Hypertext", but not from the "Technical" [2] and "Standards" [3] sections.

[1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

[2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Technical.html

[3]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/Standards/Overview.html

Ted Nelson was mentioned specifically in his original proposal document, so I would say it had some influence.

It's a fascinating dead end in the history of hypertext. Ted Nelson has always come across to me as either 51% visionary and 49% crackpot, or the other way 'round. Technically, Xanadu's bidirectional links and document transclusion (e.g., not just including links but whole sections of other web pages in yours) are really interesting. From a copyright standpoint, they're kind of a mess, and an integral idea of Xanadu is essentially being able to make links and embedded microdocuments require micropayments for usage and/or inclusion, which sounds like the kind of thing that people who don't like libertarians use to parody libertarian ideas. And, from a practical standpoint, they've just never gone anywhere -- as far as I can tell, in no small part because Mr. Nelson is apparently impossible to work with.

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827

A famous (and infamous) article, "The Curse of Xanadu", on "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing, a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair" (now closer to 50 years and counting): https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

I don't think I'd actually clicked through and seen this demo before, though, which adds some interesting new objections to it on my end -- I find the user experience here ugly and cryptic. I'm sure a much nicer one with these ideas could be made, but it seems oddly telling that Xanadu's proponents think this -- and the Xanadu web site in general -- are great ways to sell the ideas.

As a demo, I can forgive ugly and being a bit cryptic. It's the ramifications that get me. Okay, in the main document, you have a transclusion link to the King James Bible (Genesis 1:1-3). But one of the main points of Xanadu is the bidirectional links, so when you switch to reading the King James Bible, you should also see bidirectional links not only to the document you were just reading ("Xanadoc"), but every other link to the King James Bible in Xanalogical space, and past a few dozen such links, things will get incredibly messy (and a "missed opportunity"---one of the sides documents actually quotes one of the other side documents, yet there's no link).

Note that since Xanadu links and transclusions are external, you can select which linkbases to show. So you can filter them, which is important because otherwise you will surely end up with an unlimited number of links on every single character. :)

If the system is working correctly, you should always be able to follow transcluded quotations back to their original primary source - that is one of the most fundamental design principles. Conversely, the rightsholder of a document should be able to see where their work is being quoted.

So all in all quite like the sprawling mansion of the same name from the Citizen Kaine film then?

More like Coleridge's unfinished poem Kubla Khan[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan

Yeah, I dont get it either.

Imagine web had actual support for hypertext. Then you couldn't just "hotlink" images, but also "hotlink" (i.e. natively quote, and annotate) textual content, with arbitrary start and end-points. As it is, html can't can't even express the equivalent of margin notes or footnotes, because it has some braindamaged ideas about inline vs block elements and the former can't contain the latter (they changed the nomenclature, but I'm pretty sure the limitation remains).

Not just text, either. Other media formats as well, though text was always the first format supported.

SGML, the meta-language on which HTML is based, has entities ie text expansion variables bound to the content of external resources accessed via URLs or file names. So HTML itself doesn't need such mechanisms if it's understood that general markup facilities of SGML are available (which however isn't the case with browsers). XML (XInclude) attempted to establish more granular inclusion of external document fragments via XPath, but failed on the web. Even if HTML had transclusion, what would the use case look like? HTML as a markup vocabulary was introduced for casual academic publishing at CERN, reusing folklore SGML markup elements that were already widely used at the time. You can argue that HTML has been effectively stagnant while everything around it (CSS and JS) was changed ad absurdum to cater for HTML's limitations, but still in an academic setting, you'll use inline citations or block quotes with references to sources, just as HTML is providing.

You can do all this with the mostly ignored part of Fielding's REST, HATEOAS.

Xanadu has a lot of interesting ideas and Nelson is a visionary, though the idea to visually link works just doesn't work. However, transclusion is an important idea, that is critical for Wikipedia's style of evolution, and will be important as Wikidata and other linked data (semantic web) applications get off the ground.

However, the vast majority of the web consists of cheap short cut web sites that aren't much different than dial up systems. AKA start up money grabbing culture trying to carve up every little idea into a unicorn. And once they start carving things up, they sure don't want to collapse it and help create the semantic web, except privately behind the scenes, in creepy surveillance capitalist and other centralizing projects.