Xanadu '96 featuring Glass Wings and Hyper-G in Australia

Andrew Pam, Xanadu Australia, P.O. Box 409, Canterbury, VIC 3126, Australia. Phone +61 3 9651 1511 Fax +61 3 9651 1502 Email: avatar@xanadu.com.au
Keywords: Xanadu, Hyper-G, HyperWave, Hypermedia, Multimedia, Intranet

Introduction

Xanadu project[HREF1] has been working on networked hypermedia since 1960, and coined the words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1965. A brief historical summary is available as Question 4 [HREF2] of the Xanadu FAQ[HREF3] . In the last couple of years Xanadu has been in transition from a monolithic, proprietary design (1979-1992) to a series of open proposals and design specifications (1993 onwards). Glass Wings began as a traditional paper publisher but moved entirely to online publishing in 1994 with the launch of the Glass Wings [HREF4] website. Recently Glass Wings has been using Hyper-G (now HyperWave [HREF5] ) as a step forward towards the Xanadu goals.

Xanadu '96

Xanadu was originally envisaged as a single monolithic global hypermedia system, as outlined by Ted Nelson in "Literary Machines" (Nelson 1993). With the rise of the Internet and eventually the advent of the World Wide Web it became apparent that such a system was finally starting to take shape and becoming widely used just as Ted had predicted many years before. However there are still many shortcomings to the World Wide Web as currently implemented using HTTP and HTML, some of which were discussed in my paper "WhereWorld Wide Web Went Wrong" [HREF6] (Pam 1995). Some of the key components of Xanadu that have now been identified as seperable issues include:
  • Connections between documents, including hyperlinks (connections between different content) and transclusions (connections between the same content in different contexts). Xanadu hyperlinks can have other uses besides navigation and are visible from all endpoints, which requires that they be applicative as with HyperWave rather than embedded as with HTML. Transclusion is only partially supported by HTML at present and work on extending this to text is presently under way at Keio University as documented in "Methods forimplementing transclusion of text into HTML pages" [HREF7] .
  • Changes to documents, resulting in a 2 dimensional "hypertime" history of document versions and branching alternates. This is discussed briefly in "Literary Machines" and much more extensively in the "Xanadu Hypermedia Server Developer Documentation" (The Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. 1993) and the video "A Technical Overview of the Xanadu System" (Nelson n.d.).
  • Identification of documents. For reliability and performance reasons it is desirable to store documents on more than one server, probably in geographically dispersed locations. It is also necessary to move a document from one server to another from time to time for various reasons. It is thus important to have a method of identifying documents independent of their location in order to maintain the validity of hyperlinks and transclusions over time. It should also be possible to alter the conceptual hierarchy of a server without affecting document identification and hence retrieval.
  • Re-use of documents under transcopyright. The transcopyright permission doctrine set forth in "Transcopyright:Pre-Permission for Virtual Republishing" [HREF8] is intended to address the problems of copyright and rights clearance online by permitting authors to create composite documents containing material owned by other authors or publishers by reference (transclusion) to material where the owner has explicitly granted permission in advance for such use.
  • Microdelivery and micropayment for documents. Composite documents may reference only a portion of another document, necessitating a method for the reader to purchase (probably pro-rata if there is a price on the document) and retrieve arbitrary portions of other documents. Xanadu recently held an invitation-only meeting in San Francisco to discuss the current state of the art in online payment with very high resolution.

    Glass Wings and Hyper-G in Australia

    Glass Wings was formed to publish the works of the owners and to solicit and publish other related material by other creators. Of particular note are TheAdventures of Rocketship Ginger [HREF9] , the first multimedia comic strip published on the Internet, and The BunnyPeople of Planet Pynk! [HREF10] which was used to explore the variety of audio compression techniques available on the Internet discussed further in "A comparison ofInternet audio compression formats" [HREF11] .

    Since Glass Wings in its current form publishes exclusively online (for reasons largely of cost effectiveness) it has become very important to find a means by which creators can be paid for their contributions without overly reducing their audience. Current contributions to Glass Wings are generally provided without any expectation of payment, but creators must earn a living somehow and cannot afford to publish all their material at no charge. Like many other online publishers using the World Wide Web as it exists presently, Glass Wings has turned to advertisers for sponsorship.

    Hyper-G (now HyperWave) currently provides two charging mechanisms, described in more detail in "Hyper-G: The Second Generation Web Solution" (Maurer 1996): documents may be offered at a fixed price for each retrieval, or a license for a fixed number of copies may be granted to a server which will prevent more than that number of concurrent retrievals within a configured timeout period. The Xanadu transcopyright system proposes an even more flexible payment mechanism.

    HyperWave also implements other important aspects of the Xanadu designs such as bivisible and bifollowable links, persistence of URLs regardless of changes to the conceptual hierarchy of the server, and the transclusion of entire documents into multiple "collections". Full transclusion of arbitrary document fragments enabling the creation of composite documents is not presently supported. HyperWave also provides full text indexing of all documents, multi-lingual support and impressive 2D and 3D link visualisation tools under Unix.

    For all these reasons Glass Wings has recently begun using HyperWave at hyperg://hyperg.glasswings.com.au/[HREF12] and ftp://ftp.glasswings.com.au/pub/Hyper-G/ [HREF14] .

    Conclusion

    HyperWave is developing into a powerful second-generation server eminently suitable for many Internet and Intranet solutions. Xanadu continues to work on proposals for further development in global hypermedia systems. Glass Wings hopes to continue publishing in the amazing and continually evolving world of online hypermedia.

    References

    Maurer, H. 1996, Hyper-G: The Second Generation Web Solution, Addison-Wesley

    Nelson, Ted n.d., A Technical Overview of the Xanadu System (video), Mindful Press, Sausalito California. Nelson, Ted 1993, Literary Machines, Mindful Press, Sausalito California.

    Pam, A. 1995, 'Where World Wide Web Went Wrong', AUUG '95 & Asia-Pacific World Wide Web '95 Conference & Exhibition Conference Proceedings, Charles Sturt University, Sydney.

    The Xanadu Operating Company, Inc. 1992, Xanadu Hypermedia Server Developer Documentation, Mindful Press, Sausalito California.

    Hypertext References

    HREF1 lefthttp://www.xanadu.com.au/xanadu/ Xanadu home page

    HREF2 lefthttp://www.xanadu.com.au/xanadu/faq.html#4 Xanadu history

    HREF3 lefthttp://www.xanadu.com.au/xanadu/faq.html Xanadu FAQ

    HREF4 lefthttp://www.glasswings.com.au/GlassWings/ Glass Wings home page

    HREF5

    lefthttp://www.hyperwave.com/ HyperWave home page

    HREF6 lefthttp://www.xanadu.com.au/xanadu/6w-paper.html Where World Wide Web Went Wrong

    HREF7 lefthttp://www.xanadu.com.au/xanadu/transclude.html Methods for implementing transclusion of text into HTML pages

    HREF8 lefthttp://www.xanadu.com.au/xanadu/transcopy.html Transcopyright: Pre-Permission for Virtual Republishing

    HREF9 lefthttp://www.glasswings.com.au/GlassWings/jolly/ginger/ The Adventures of Rocketship Ginger

    HREF10 lefthttp://www.glasswings.com.au/GlassWings/jolly/bunny/ The Bunny People of Planet Pynk!

    HREF11 lefthttp://www.sericyb.com.au/sc/audio.html A comparison of Internet audio compression formats

    HREF12 lefthyperg://hyperg.glasswings.com.au/ Glass Wings via Hyper-G protocol

    HREF13 lefthttp://hyperg.glasswings.com.au:8000/ Glass Wings Hyper-G server

    HREF14 leftftp://ftp.glasswings.com.au/pub/Hyper-G/ Australian Hyper-G mirror site

    Copyright

    Andrew Pam © 1996. The authors assigns to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.
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