Re: [xanadu] Proposed naming of addresses solution

["First Speaker Schol-R-LEA;2" <scholr1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re-reading my first reply (written late last night), I've noticed that 
there were a few lost trains of thought there, but no matter. What has 
occurred to me is that an example of how Xanadu works - both inside and 
outside - is called for. This is how I understand it works, though I'd 
be glad to get any corrections on it from those who know the system better.

Let's say you are writing a proposal for, I dunno, a new research grant. 
You need to write a proposal, which would have to include data from your 
recent work, and links to appropriate bibliographical material.

OK, so you open up your editor, and start writing the proposal. You 
enter the title, which creates a trace which Xanadu then saves, along 
with an anchor link to it in the global document space for your 
workstation. (I can't for the life of me recall what the rather arcane 
terminology that the Gold group came up with for these things was, so 
I'm sort of making it up as I go along - please bear with me) It also 
creates a trail to a virtual link - which in turn points to the parent 
link - that your editor can use to manipulate the document with. It is 
this trail which actually gets changed, *not* the trace or the anchor. 
The trail contains not only the link to the anchor, but also the uptake 
point within the trace, and how much of the trace to use.

When you have your title, you decide to set it to use a 14pt sans-serif 
font. The editor marks the original path to the trace as a branch off of 
the current trail, creates a trace for the font meta-data and adds a 
path to it, puts the path to the original trace at the end. The font is 
not considered a part of the actual data, note, but rather part of how 
it is to be displayed.


You then continue with the paper itself, adding a new paragraph; the 
start of the new paragraph is indicated by another type of meta-data 
link. The new paragraph itself is saved as a new trace with it's own 
anchor link, which the trails gets modifies to have a path into. 
Partway through editing this, you decide you don't like the wording of 
something, so you go change it. The old path gets marked as a branch, 
and the trail is modified so that the path to the paragraph only spans a 
part of the whole trail, then another trace is created for the new 
material, followed in turn by a second path into the old version of the 
paragraph spanning the part after the edit.

Note that it is the editor (both the program and the person) which 
chooses where to create new traces and paths; the Xanadu server is 
creating them for the editor, but doesn't impose any particular method 
of chunking the data into traces. An editor program could be written to 
work like a conventional editor, going through the whole editing process 
and waiting until the user hits 'save', then dropping the whole document 
into Xanadu as a single large trace. Conversely, it could save every 
single keystroke and mouse action the user enters, to be re-played like 
some deranged macro recorder when the document is to be viewed. Both of 
these approaches are wasteful and contrary to the Xanadu spirit, 
however, the former being very coarse-grained and lacking the history 
information which is so crucial to Xanadu, the latter absurdly 
fine-grained and resulting in data bloat. Each program - or even 
different settings within a program - determines how fine-grained the 
hyperdata should be, as appropriate to the application.

Now, then, let's say you need to add bibliographic information as you 
are going along, including links to the bibliography at each reference. 
Rather than creating some page in the document directly, which you could 
unintentionally overwrite or which you would have to add page breaks to 
or whathaveyou, you can instead open up a second editing window, create 
a separate document for the bibliography, and add a link in the first 
one that will, when displayed later, will show the bibliography as part 
of the published document, but which the editor keeps out of your way 
while you are working on it. Whenever you need a link to a section of 
the bibliography, you select the linked section in the bibliography, 
then go back to main document and tell the editor to insert a hyperlink 
to the particular path at that location. The link is just like all of 
the other links, *but* the display information for the link says 
something like, 'don't transclude the data here, just put a hyperlink to 
it with such-and-such meaning of indicating the link here and have it 
trigger on so-and-so event'. You could set the hyperlink up to open the 
trace or document, or to transclude it on the fly when the link is 
triggered, or various other actions of your choosing.

Let's also say that you have to include some data from a spreadsheet 
someone else created on a different machine somewhere, and you have 
access to a public link leading to that data. Now, as far as Xanadu is 
concerned, the spreadsheet data isn't any different from the data in 
your text document. Presumably, if the spreadsheet was designed in a 
Xanalogical fashion, each cell is stored as a separate trace. You can 
choose to put a path to the whole spreadsheet trail (including the 
tabular layout), or to individual cells, or even to just a part of the 
data in a cell. Note that this will point to the data that is in the 
spreadsheet at the time you create your document; to have it point to 
the current version of the spreadsheet, so that it is automagically 
updated as the spreadsheet is changed, you would put a sort of indirect 
link - let's call it a 'path marker', though I think the U.Gold name for 
it was 'sensor' or something similar - which points instead to the 
spreadsheet trail as a structure, not the specific traces in it, and 
uses whatever trace the cell *currently* leads to.

Now, I've been talking about these links as if they are unidirectional, 
but that's not actually the case. A Xanadu link is 'bi-visible', which 
is to say, it links the trace to the trail as well as the trail to the 
trace. If you (or someone who has permission to see your document) go to 
a trace which you've linked or transcluded and views the links that are 
attached to that trace, they would see your document as one of the 
links, and could follow that link back to your document.

When you are finished with your document, you then choose who has 
permission to view it. Like everything else, this can be as fine or 
coarse grained a you wish; if part of the document is to be visible to 
only certain people, it can simply hide those parts, or blank them out, 
or do whatever you want it to do if someone without permissions for that 
section views the document.

I hope that this has clarified more than it has confused. Comments and 
corrections welcome.

--
Schol-R-LEA;2, LCF ELF BiWM MGT POEE JAM GS SMOF KCO KoR TGIF
First Speaker, Last Eristic Church of Finagle and Holy Bisexuality
Episkopos of the Dr Benway Lives for Your Sins Cabal
"The Opposition is the keystone of the Establishment."