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by tobr
1957 days ago
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It reminds me of Ted Nelson, who has worked on a nebulous vision of hypermedia for 60 (!) years. While he’s been incapable of shipping his vision, a nearly indistinguishable version of hypermedia changed the world through the world wide web. For some reason he does not accept that as validation of his vision, but as a poorly designed rip-off. |
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Despite his failure to ship, Nelson's vision hasn't been particularly nebulous. Overambitious, somewhat srlf-referential and brittle, perhaps, but fairly clear.
And I definitely don't think the WWW is 'nearly indistinguishable'. A few features that are missing are (off the top of my head): bidirectional links, link referential integrity, versioning, annotations, transclusions with attribution and provenance, etc.
Now, none of that ever shipped. Little of it ever got as far as a PoC as part of Xanadu/Udanax. And it is pretty clear in hindsight that, if implemented, the spam problems created by many of those features could have dwarfed what we (or rather, search engines) have to deal with today (remember blog referer linkspam? That's what bidirectional links with server-enforced referential integrity leads to). Arguably, the WWW wasn't just the simplest thing that could work, but also flourished because TBL didn't attempt to implement many of Nelson's cherished features.
But that the web today falls far short of Nelson's vision, and that as visions go, his was fairly clear (If overly reliant on neologisms like enfilade etc. usually defined in terms of implementation details such as novel datastructures rather than formats or protocols), shouldn't be particularly controversial.