Ted Nelson, currently a visiting professor at Oxford University, is admired as a modern philosopher who worked in the fields of information, computers, and human-machine interfaces. He founded Project Xanadu in 1960 with the goal of creating such a system on a computer network, further documented in his 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines.
The Xanadu project itself failed to take off, but aspects of its vision are in the process of being fulfilled by Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web, that owes much of its inspiration to Xanadu.
Nelson dislikes the World Wide Web, the Internet, XML and all embedded markup, and regards Berners-Lee's work as a gross over-simplification of his own work.
"HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management."
He is currently working on a new information structure, ZigZag, information about which can be found off the Xanadu project home page, which also contains two versions of the Xanadu code.
In 2001 he was knighted by France as "Officier des Arts et Lettres". In 2004 he was appointed as a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and associated with the Oxford Internet Institute - where he is currently conducting his research.
