<story><title>The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu</title><url>https://maggieappleton.com/xanadu-patterns</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>specialist</author><text>I now have two reservations (open questions) about Project Xanadu.&lt;p&gt;Centralization&lt;p&gt;I believe but cannot yet prove that (durable) two-way links require some kind of central authority.&lt;p&gt;I was very slow to appreciate that Nelson always intended for Project Xanadu to be centralized (authoritative?). Much like Facebook and AOL. Whole onto themselves. Walled gardens.&lt;p&gt;Being a huge fan of the Xanadu vision (and never understanding the tech or stack), I was disappointed with the Web&amp;#x27;s one-way links.&lt;p&gt;Now I see that we dodged a bullet. A suspect that an &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; Web and two-way links are mutually incompatible.&lt;p&gt;Tumblers&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve always wanted the transclusion feature. But I never fully grokked tumbers, Xanadu&amp;#x27;s fundamental data structure. I&amp;#x27;d done a bit of work with SNMP MIB, which uses OIDs. Honestly, they sucked. But I couldn&amp;#x27;t think of anything better.&lt;p&gt;Now I suspect the tumbler approach has been mooted by the advances in version control systems.&lt;p&gt;I still want something like purple numbers or xpointers. Some kind of &amp;quot;light weight&amp;quot; tumbler. Not to say the tumbler data structure is itself heavy; just the over reliance on tumblers. So something like tumblers, as needed, when they&amp;#x27;re a value-add. So intra-document tumblers, not inter-document (eg directory, catalog). And definitely not for document management (workflows, version control).&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;Thanks for reading. I write to understand. (And Xanadu is something I&amp;#x27;ve struggled to understand for decades.) Feedback appreciated.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu</title><url>https://maggieappleton.com/xanadu-patterns</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jimmySixDOF</author><text>For the last couple of years WonderOS has explored what a return to first principles OS design might look like today and there are definitely parallels to Xanadu with explicit callouts to Hypercard, Vannevar Bush and Engelbert if you explore the Lab Notes from the developer which are very thoughtful.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;.... an itemized user environment. The item is an alternative boundary for our digital things which may let us interact with our devices more fluidly, and reflect our thinking more accurately, across our entire personal computing domain.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wonderos.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wonderos.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>