Information on Xanadu bi-directional links

[xanni]

Purely for your information:

Xanadu links are not only “bi directional”, but actually have four properties:

1. Origin (the document containing the link itself)
2. Source (one end of the relationship described by the link)
3. Destination (the other end of the relationship)
4. Type (the kind of relationship expressed by the link).

Note that the first property requires that all links are both decentralised and decoupled from the documents being linked, so when visualising documents you can select whose links you want to see. This allows the links to scale and to be moderated. In addition to the links you have authored yourself, you can also choose to subscribe to certain other link collections - or not.

HTML does support some of these concepts with the “link rel” and “link rev” tags, but unfortunately they have to be embedded into the documents themselves. Adding them dynamically with scripts is probably the best workaround for this, but unfortunately browsers don’t really surface the “link” tags in the user interface effectively.

Cheers,
Andrew (Xanadu Australia)