Too many great talks to mention, but if I had to pick one it would be Ted Nelson's few minutes of demonstration of Xanadu. Demonstration is lacking, but what he said about the concept/idea is what stuck with me. Deep and referential(?) content. [this video]
Short Nelson demo conveying the deep idea of referential content
And if you're into watching long videos of what the digital future was supposed to look like, Douglas Adams and Tom Baker made a documentary called Hyperland , and you can watch all 50 minutes of it here: [link] or if you want a shorter video, here's Ted Nelson with a short demo of Xanadu as it existed in 2008: [this video]
this is a great supplement for this: [this video] a close up demo. His product Xanadu space, I hope it comes to light but the websites aren't looking too hot.
This video of his seems to give more of a demonstration of his alternative paradigm: [this video] It's really interesting to see, but in order for any of his idea to actually work you need to rethink the entire operating system it seems - not just the UI. He wants all content to have history, which would fundamentally break copy and paste (one of his points actually). The problem I see with that is you'd still have individual files (actual bits) on the hard drive, just they'd all have some meta content that describes it's origin. Or you'd need some sort of database file system (WinFS). I'd like to see technology trending more this guy's way, but the reality is that the technological challenges seem to be too great at the moment.
Ted Nelson demonstrates his alternative computing paradigm with content history
Everything you've mentioned completely misses the point - it is not just performance that stinks, it is not just javascript as a language that stinks - all these tools are incremental improvements that completely lack imagination. It is the platform itself - meant to display static text content, being coerced into some frankenstein that requires never-ending libraries and tooling to do what desktop apps did 20 years ago. It is hard to see any other world, so let me link you to a guy to whom it was obvious the web browsers stink decades ago. [this video] [link]
Nelson saw decades ago that web browsers were the wrong foundation
Zig Zag was meant to represent a very general set of data structures, if you're interested in documents then you, probably, would have a more specific interest in his (very long running) Xanadu project - [link] - which in some ways is very similar to OP's stuff - [this video]
Xanadu project resembles the OP's document structure ideas.
I hope to see xanadu succeed, even if it is only on some specialized niches. By seeing value on those niches more and more projects and people would understand the benefits of such system and would like to implement it. But I also believe there will be always a space for current webapps, treating links as RPCs against external systems. EDIT: For anyone interested here is Ted Nelson explaining the system in 2008 on an example system implementation of his original idea: [this video]
Nelson explains Xanadu in 2008 with an example implementation
For your perusal, here's a video of Ted demonstrating Xanadu: [0] (3min18sec to jump right to the demo) You can also browse the book he published describing the system, Literary Machines (1981) [1] -- it's a sprawling vision but I think where the parent sees overlap is in storing each text fragment as a singular entity and visualizing the links between two fragments. > A user may also make side-by-side connections of other types. On contemplating any two pieces of text, he may make a link between them. Thereafter, when he displays either piece of text, and asks to see the links, a link-symbol is displayed, and the other attached text — if he wishes to see it. > Naturally, making a marginal note consists of writing the note and hooking the link. The link facility gives us much more than the attachment of mere odds and ends. It permits fully non-sequential writing, or hypertext. BTW I really like the interface of just typing and moving my cursor around, and how easy it is to pick up a block of text and move it somewhere else. [0] [this video] [1] [link] A friend of mine is also building a memex [2](1945), as mentioned in the parent. His is a fairly radical DOS interface that he's been keying his thoughts into daily since the 80s, and it's great fun watching him try to remember something [3](2013): in about 5 or 6 keystrokes skipping across the graph of all notes, he's able to find that name on the tip of his tongue, and then hop to their phone number and the date they first met, the
Short demo of Xanadu showing linked text fragments
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
8 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more