We should have listened to Ted Nelson the first time around. For Nelson, hypertext is not just hyperlinked text. It's a permanent repository of text with hyperlinks and transclusions, both being permanent references, and DRM to ensure the rightsholders of linked/transcluded text get automatically remunerated whenever their work is downloaded/read, and a microtransaction system to enable such remuneration.
Tim Berners-Lee thought he could nick just the "good bits" from this model -- or rather, the low-hanging fruit, punting the tricky-to-implement stuff until later -- but you really need all of the parts, otherwise you will have a broken, half-working (if that) system with seams showing all over the place.
It's time to realize that Project Xanadu was the correct way to view hypertext, and compromising on that vision has cost us dearly.
It's one of those things like C that seemed like a good idea at the time, and only with the fullness of time do we come to realize its bone-deep irreparable flaws... but now we're stuck with it effectively forever.
I am actually working on a follow-up about Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu. I know it never really came to anything, but it's really fascinating the way this brilliant, Memex-like system was what all the visionaries were talking about, and what we got was a giant directory of pseudo-printed pages.
The irony of this post being on medium isn't completely lost on me while the author is perfectly capable to publish it on his own website.
Consider Spain's linktax , Google's AMP and continuous Reactification of the Web into SPAs. The present doesn't look bright but everyone except Big Tech realizes that decentralization is needed. The same thoughtless article about the Web gets posted every week with one being worse than another, the Web is dead long live the Web!
And the award for "clickbait title of the month" goes to...
The article makes some good points despite being written from the perspective of someone too young to remember the time without significant link rot when most websites were someone's home (and equally permanent), links came from people, and search engines were an immature competitor to curated directories.
Regretted the title about 20 minutes after "publishing". Mistakes were made. I do remember directories and personal pages though. I still stumble across them from time to time and it's such a pleasure. This was my latest discovery: http://www.macdougallelect.com
Around 1994, when the choice of technological platform for someone's public internet presence was between FTP or Gopher or HTTP from a server on their own network, all pages were a curated publication. Corruption required a lot of time and technology.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] threadTim Berners-Lee thought he could nick just the "good bits" from this model -- or rather, the low-hanging fruit, punting the tricky-to-implement stuff until later -- but you really need all of the parts, otherwise you will have a broken, half-working (if that) system with seams showing all over the place.
It's time to realize that Project Xanadu was the correct way to view hypertext, and compromising on that vision has cost us dearly.
WWW won exactly because it was half finished - extendable and not despite of it, otherwise we would all be using Gopher now.
The article makes some good points despite being written from the perspective of someone too young to remember the time without significant link rot when most websites were someone's home (and equally permanent), links came from people, and search engines were an immature competitor to curated directories.