Eh, well, I think Ted Nelson is a little miffed (somewhat rightfully) at not getting credit for his vision. But I keep remembering that Xanadu, much like OpenDoc in the 90s, never got off the ground. A big part of that was because it was too complex to implement: Xanadu would have required not only inventing complex new protocols, but convincing people to adopt them.
HTML+HTTP is "bad hypertext", by one way of thinking, but it has the great virtue of being really, really cheap to implement. That's what Berners-Lee wanted: Basically a smarter Gopher. Something you could teach a physicist to work in a few minutes of explanation. The "one-way link" also has the great virtue of not requiring someone's approval or blessing before you link to them. It would be a radically different web -- much more "closed", and thus probably would not have excited people nearly as much. Pat Rapp wrote: > Tornado-like destruction? Did I sleep through a tornado? > Sounds like this guy is a little grumpy. > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Alicia Henn" <[email protected]> > To: <[email protected]> > Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 6:34 PM > Subject: It could have been so different > > > > Here's an interesting article about Theodor Holm Nelson, an early > intellect in the creation of the world wide web. > > "One-way links can be easily broken, and there is no simple way to > preserve authorship and credit, as was possible with a project called > Xanadu that Mr. Nelson began in the 1960s. His two-way links might > have avoided the Web’s tornado-like destruction of the economic value > of the printed word, he has contended, by incorporating a system of > micropayments." > > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11stream.html?th&emc=th > > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
