Item — HN Reader

"If we wanted to dial up the Xanadu-esque visibility, we could work on showing previews of the whole page and directing people to specific pieces of text within it."

It has been possible to link to specific pieces of text for a while now. For example: https://maggieappleton.com/xanadu-patterns#:~:text=If%20we%2....

1 comments

We could also link directly to an office in a building by putting a ladder up to the window of a given office, but doing that completely ignores the structure of the building.

If the text changes, the link breaks.

If the server goes away, the link breaks.

When you click the link, you no longer see the prior page, your context breaks.

This is all about persistently enabling side by side viewing.

If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing. That sound like a really hard problem to handle if you are not in control of both sides.

> If the text changes you are not linking to the same thing

If the literal text changes, and the link to the specific piece of text breaks because the link is just the words. But what if the change to the text is fixing a typo, or changing 'he' to 'they'? Nelson's vision was not about linking to text, it was about linking ideas. See https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800197.806036