In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. His initial proposal, presented the year before, was “that a global hypertext space be created in which any network-accessible information could be referred to by a single ‘Universal Document Identifier’”.

The idea was beautifully simple, and was given away for free, for the greater good of all. On the server side, there were web pages written in a hypertext markup language (HTML) that followed simple conventions and rules. On the client side, there was a browser that was able to translate the HTML code into a readable format. The web of browsable pages was knitted together by hypertext links, which became known as URLs.

As Berners-Lee expresses it: “The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialise. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together”. (The World Wide Web: A very short personal history)

The World Wide Web was conceived as a means by which Berners-Lee and his colleagues could share their research across time and space. Berners-Lee shared his office at Cern with Hakon Lie, chief technology officer for Opera Software, who also worked with Berners-Lee at the W3C from 1995 until he joined Opera in 1999. Lie contributed the vital concept of Cascading Style Sheets to the W3C standards, without which the Web would not be what it is today. “What struck me about CERN is the natural beauty of the surroundings,” he has said. “It’s really a beautiful place. But then you get inside the CERN buildings. It’s all of these very strict corridors with doors lined up. Order prevails. I think that’s a metaphor for the Web. This conflict between images and order that I often see. HTML was conceived of as this very orderly language, but people are using it to publish beautiful web designs and images. That conflict plays out in the pages people publish today.”

Berners-Lee had an unfashionable vision of “the Web’s potential to foster a global village, not its potential to earn him a villa and a fleet of cars”, but he was not the first to have that vision, and credits his inspiration for the Web to Professor Ted Nelson, the man who coined the term ‘hyperlink’ back in the ’60s, and described the whole messy concept in Dream Machines, published in 1974.

Nelson is one of those inspired thinkers whose concepts don’t always make it into the practical world in the form that he would wish, because he moves too fast, already busy with the next idea but one. For the last 30 years or so he has been working on Xanadu, a mysterious computer system to beat all systems, and a complex vision of a future reality that exists in a parallel universe to our own, that has been promised at regular intervals for years but has yet to see the light of day.

About contemporary computer systems Nelson writes: “Today’s popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.” Xanadu claims to solve these problems, and more.

In 1960, while studying for a masters degree in sociology at Harvard, Nelson enrolled on a computer course for the humanities, and “was struck by a vision of what could be”. For his term project, written in Assembler on a mainframe, he attempted to devise a text-handling system which would allow writers to revise, compare, and undo their work, years before the concept of word processors had been invented.

Some five years later he came up with the term ‘hypertext’. Since that date, Nelson has been working on his life’s project, a software framework he named Xanadu, which would be a “magic place of literary memory,” named after Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, and described at length in his book, Literary Machines.

Xanadu is as illusory as Coleridge’s poem, which was famously “composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium taken to check a dysentery, at a Farm House between Porlock and Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church, in the fall of the year, 1797”, and was never completed because of the arrival of “a person on business from Porlock”, after which the memory of the dream escaped him.

At sixteen Nelson described himself as a "poet, philosopher and rogue." In latter days he has preferred to call himself "a systems humanist."

In Dream Machines, published in 1974, Nelson promised that Xanadu would be released by 1976. His system, a welcome throwback to the ideals of the ’60s, would be used to “foster free expression and empower people where earlier forms of communication, TV, radio, and print, were largely one-way, hierarchic, and disempowering.” In the 1987 edition of Literary Machines, the release date was revised to 1988. In January 1988, Nelson wrote in Byte magazine that Xanadu would be completed by 1991. Amazingly, an initial version was released in August 1999 - apparently to prove prior art on patents that had been claimed on ideas that he had proposed years before - but has yet to see any kind of world wide acceptance, it's raison d'etre long since superseded by the Web we know today.

The latest manifestation of Xanadu is known as ZigZag and can be found at www.xanadu.net

Sometimes we need the man with the mad idea to show the way to others so that the mad idea may become reality, and maybe the Web owes more to Nelson than he is usually given credit for... He himself quotes Oscar Wilde:

"Everybody's waiting for me to die so they can say how much they appreciated my work. But nobody will back me."

Richard Hillesley

References

The Xanadu project www.xanadu.net

Ted Nelson's Home Pages
http://ted.hyperland.com/
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/