Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever

The World Wide Web was not what we were working toward, it was what we were trying to *prevent*. The Web displaced our principled model with something far more raw, chaotic and short-sighted. Its one-way breaking links glorified and fetishized as “websites” those very hierarchical directories from which we sought to free users, and discarded the ideas of stable publishing, annotation, two-way connection and trackable change.

This article is intended to explain our alternative model.

Vannevar Bush: As We May Think

Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.

.. When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined.

 

BBC: Visionary lays into the web

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened. In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking. The heavens rolled apart. This was it – it was obvious, the human race would spend the rest of its career at computer screens.

.. The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions – everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.

.. So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything? The ideas keep going, you have the material, you cut because there’s a limit to the space allowed to you. And the space is limited because of some other constraints that have to do with money or printing or whatever.

.. But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in – make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded. So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.

.. you may now be sufficiently immured in the system that you now using anything else would be unsettling.