Re: New subscribers

[Andrew Pam <avatar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I'd like to learn as much as I can about implementations of the original
> Xanadu design goals, since I see those as the fountainhead of what I'm now
> making my living doing, and I perceive the need for many of the Xanadu
> features that have never been implemented in the Web as it currently
> exists.

Absolutely.  There are a number of important features of the Xanadu design
not currently implemented in WWW; here are some quick notes I made recently:

* Lack of transparent support for mirroring
- could be addressed by having clients handle multiple A records in DNS

* Lack of an underlying distributed file system
- addressed by "file:" URLs with an underlying filesystem such as AFS
- addressed by Hyper-G
- partially addressed by cacheing proxy servers, but needs improvement

* Lack of bivisibility and bifollowability
- partially addressed by Hyper-G
- solution hampered by SGML-style embedded markup

* Limited support for transclusions
- images can be transcluded, but only in full
- text (and arbitrary data) should be transcludeable
- copyright and rights clearance issues need to be addressed

> I'd like to learn more about what's already been designed and implemented
> of the Xanadu feature set, and I'd like to keep informed as people graft
> these features onto the Web using evolving modular technologies. I might
> have opportunity to sell some of vivid's clients on some of these
> technologies if we find a close match between our client's needs and one of
> the new technologies.

Yes, this is also one of the core aims of Xanadu Australia, since we
deploy and demonstrate these technologies through Glass Wings.  I am still
working on the "xanalogy" paper I circulated on this list a while ago,
and will probably post an updated version here soon.  There will also
shortly be a number of fairly significant announcements on the xanews list.

Thank you very much for your response!

Share and enjoy,
		*** AVATAR ***
-- 
<mailto:avatar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>                  Andrew Pam
<http://www.aus.xanadu.com/xanadu>              Coordinator, Xanadu Australia
<http://www.glasswings.com.au/GlassWings>       Technical Editor, Glass Wings
<http://www.sericyb.com.au/sc>                  Manager, Serious Cybernetics
P.O. Box 409, Canterbury VIC 3126 Australia     Phone +61 3 9888-8845