I often think in terms of trying to decompose a high-dimensional space into ~principal components, and then describing the principal components in isolation. E.g. in social situations, there’s the prestige component, the dominance component, the coalition politics component, etc.
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Each is best understood by thinking about it by itself, as a pure vector unadulterated with the other components. But then any real-world example is a data point that mixes everything together. And of course the vectors aren’t orthogonal, and they mix chaotically....
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This is what hypertext was supposed to be for—“everything is deeply intertwingled” was Ted Nelson’s slogan. I persist in writing hypertext books even though no one can make sense of the format. His vision had level-of-detail sliders and other mechanisms not yet available.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler and
It's odd that no one has made a go at fully implementing Nelson's vision. One would think that modern web frameworks (React, etc.) would make it petty straightforward.
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Replying to @StephenPiment @KevinSimler and
Yes… although a problem is that he was never able to clearly explain what his vision was/is. Xanadu was funded for a while and I was one hop from some of the key implementors (may have met them, I forget) and this was the main obstacle.
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Replying to @Meaningness @StephenPiment and
Also, much of the work is in the backend ontology. A critical piece was bidirectional links into the middle of documents. It’s hard/impossible to reconcile this with versioning.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler and
Right, one would need further design to carve out a "maximal consistent subset" of the vision. But that doesn't seem too hard.
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Replying to @StephenPiment @KevinSimler and
That would be great… I’ve thought about building tools specifically for making hypertext books. There’s a few around but none are adequate for even basic functionality like on http://meaningness.com . (So I’ve done some minimal hacking but it’s not a good solution.)
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Replying to @Meaningness @StephenPiment and
There’s a chicken-and-egg issue: no one understands what a hypertext book is, because there are so few of them; there are few because the tools are inadequate; there’s no demand for better tools because no one wants to write hypertext books, because no one can read them….
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Replying to @Meaningness @StephenPiment and
Do you know any further examples of hypertext books that are at least somewhat readable? So far, your books are the only ones I found that fit this category. I'm not even sure what I should put into Google to find them.
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David Chapman Retweeted Prathyush
A collection here from @prathyvsh : https://twitter.com/prathyvsh/status/1210324717619429376?s=20 … (plus follow-on tweets)
David Chapman added,
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Replying to @Meaningness @JakobSchwich and
David Chapman Retweeted David Chapman
This is probably my favorite:https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1210323242382020608?s=20 …
David Chapman added,
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Replying to @Meaningness @JakobSchwich and0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
End of conversation
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Replying to @Meaningness @JakobSchwich and
Prathyush Retweeted Andy Matuschak
The list grew a bit with this
@andymatuschak thread: https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1246937718283624449 … I went ahead and started collecting them in a Telegram broadcast here: https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAFhsWphUr5RrUtpiCw …Prathyush added,
Andy MatuschakVerified account @andy_matuschakThere are surprisingly few serious "web books"! I don't even mean "fancy new media books"—just: written primarily for and read primarily on the web. Collecting some favorites. Please reply with yours! * Butterick's Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com (more
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