Maybe I shouldn't have expressed how much I like HTML/CSS to a Xanadu advocate?

@alcinnz TIL about Xanadu. They claim that the Web copied their ideas but also that they "are not currently providing details of our formats, which are still under development and will be undergoing review for some time", despite allegedly being under development since the 1960s. Oh, and the web is a crappy version of their ideas which are totally not over engineered, despite not being hashed out after 6 decades.

@jmcs @alcinnz As someone who has followed Ted Nelson and Xanadu since the 80s, and built a hypertext system before the web, Xanadu's failure is a very sad story.

There were some bad technical decisions (Smalltalk), some bad development decisions (throwing the whole thing away and starting again from scratch several times), and so on. But worst of all, they were 40 years ahead of their time. Most people didn't even understand the web for a decade or so after it started.

@mathew
Smalltalk is underselling it: XOC was trying to implement a custom dialect of Smalltalk that compiled to C++, in order to do a full rewrite in it, which replaced a nearly-complete implementation already done in C.

(Both the C implementation & the pseudo-smalltalk one that replaced it were finally released as open source in 1999.)

The worst part is, it would have worked if John Walker hadn't left Autodesk before it was finished (thus causing all his pet projects -- including the XOC acquisition -- to be cut off).

@enkiv2 Are you still in touch with John these days? He seems to have gone a bit antigay.

@radehi
John who?

@enkiv2 Walker.

@radehi
I never met John Walker; I came into Xanadu in 2010.

I hadn't heard that he had gone anti-gay. That's too bad.

@enkiv2 Anti-trans at least. Part of the culture war.