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An ambitious electronic data storage and
retrieval system devised by Theodore Nelson in the 1960s and named after the
mythical place in Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan". Nelson is credited with
coining the term hypertext to help describe his system., which he
portrayed as "a universal instantaneous hypertext publishing network". Many
of Xanadu's proposed features precede similar ones found in today's world
wide web, although it is a mistake to think of Xanadu as being weblike
in any meaningful way; indeed, Nelson has been hypercritical of the web and
modem software design generally. Instead, it concentrates on solving the
problems of version management and rights management (both serious problems
on the web) through the use of reusable but nonetheless copyright
hypermedia published from a central pool of content.
Nelson
himself described Xanadu as being well known but poorly understood, a
situation that was not improved by his tortuous descriptions of his work and
his penhant for contrived words such as humber (a contraction of humungous
number), xanalogical storage and the docuverse. No real
implementation of Xanadu exists today, despite decades of effort by Nelson
to realise his vision, although some of the underlying code was made
available to the open source community in 1999, |
