Another example of this is the Python 2 to Python 3 transition. Python 3 is just too radical a change. Many features from it were backported to 2.7 to make the transition easier.
I think the Wave protocol had a similar problem. I decide to make an agent and just going through all the detailed protocol stuff discouraged me from digging in right away. I figured if it becomes big, I'll jump in again. On the other hand, I learnt plain-text SMTP as a kid and over time picked up MIME, TLS/PGP etc.
The Xanadu versus HTML choice is more complicated than the number of innovations. The Xanadu vision made you buy into the authors POV whereas HTML didn't.
> Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
No one thought that you needed permission to cite someone else's work before the intertubes.
A link is an actionable citation, but the action is under the complete control of linked-to site which presumably owns relevant rights to the document in question.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 26.2 ms ] threadPermission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
No one thought that you needed permission to cite someone else's work before the intertubes.
A link is an actionable citation, but the action is under the complete control of linked-to site which presumably owns relevant rights to the document in question.