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Saturday, March 30, 2002 |
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Transclusion, Ted Nelson, and Xanadu
A correspondent asked about my use of the term transclusion. I said I thought it came from Ted Nelson and Xanadu, and that I was using it correctly, but that I'd check and make sure.
Here's Google's #1 page on transclusion. I think I got it right. We transclude images on the web, but not typically documents. And it's not surprising that we don't, or haven't until now. Documents that didn't have the ability to be transcluded in a collapsed state, and then gradually revealed, would be overwhelming.
It's really interesting to see Sjoerd Visscher, Joshua Allen, and presumably others I don't yet know about, pushing the envelope on ways to manage accordian structures in the browser. It's going to be important, I think.
Trivia note: Dave and I were present at the Open Source convention, in 1999, at which Ted Nelson released the source code to Xanadu. This was the first time Dave and I met, I think. We sat side by side in the terminal garden, blogging the event -- me to my BYTE.com newsgroup, Dave to Scripting.com. We had so much fun Dave missed his panel. Here's the article I filed on the convention.
7:14:51 PM 
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Sjoerd Visscher's outline renderer / MS XSLT Server
Here's another extremely cool outline renderer over at Sjoerd Visscher's W3Future blog. Beautifully done. I love the optional node property display. This renderer also does something subtle but important that Radio's built-in render doesn't. It distinguishes visually between outline-transclusion links and ordinary hyperlinks. As these exhibit different behaviors, I think it makes sense that they should also look different.
Sjoerd notes, by the way:
In the previous version I used client side XML parsing. But all the different versions of MS's XML parser caused some problems, and IE6 does not allow script to load resources from other domains by default.
I've been struggling with this too. The W3C XLST service is a wonderful way to enable non-server-administrators to compose XSLT-based services. It'd be great to expose the capabilities of MSXML in the same way. Microsoft, how about it? You've got TerraServer running as an example of a heavy-duty MS-based world-accessible service. Why not the MS XSLT Server too?
11:28:36 AM
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Group discussion and instant outlining
I've done more than my share of threaded discussion, and I'm enjoying the reprieve from it that I'm getting with these more indirect modes of blogging and instant outlining. Nevertheless, I can't help but imagine a group outline for the kinds of discussions that should be directly interactive, and should yield a central and canonical transcript.
Think of a newsgroup-style outline that nobody (or else maybe only a moderator) can reorganize, where everybody can contribute new nodes and edit their own nodes, but where nobody can edit other peoples' nodes.
Result: a brainstorming environment that centralizes communication in those cases where you want it centralized. Parts can be taken out, massaged/rearranged/edited, and put back in as new or revised commentary.
This would not be a substitute for the narrate-your-work metaphor, which I completely understand and have advocated often. Rather, it's complementary to that style. Sometimes meeting transcripts really do need to appear all in one place, for the convenience of current and future participants. Outlines can preserve context much better than email, because they retain state and because they can transclude. But the collective state of a set of individual outlines is not anywhere visible. In general, it can't be and shouldn't be. The model of many individual spaces, messages sent to these spaces, and people subscribed to the spaces, is really powerful and important. Sometimes, though, there's still a need for spaces that are explicitly group, not individual, in nature.
Group blogs exist already. Group outlines doubtless will emerge too. The human protocols are pretty well understood, but interactive outline editing will bring new challenges and opportunities.
1:58:18 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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