Xanadu project

The Xanadu project was an ambitious concept envisioned by Ted Nelson in the 1960s, which aimed to create a more advanced version of the World Wide Web. It featured built-in versioning and a mechanism called transclusion that allowed documents to embed other documents seamlessly. Despite its innovative ideas, Project Xanadu failed to deliver any usable software by the time the Web was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee himself acknowledged Xanadu in the early designs of the Web, considering his creation a less sophisticated version of what Xanadu intended to be. Later, a related project called Open Xanadu was released in 2014, which was notable for its transparency but was not necessarily open-source 1.

Additionally, Mark Miller and Douglas Crockford, inspired by the concepts of Xanadu, worked on enhancing JavaScript's security features while at Google. This collaboration led to the development of JavaScript features such as strict mode and object freeze, aimed at improving security through better sandboxing capabilities 2.