Slashdot Mirror
Hypertext Creator: Structure of the Web 'Completely Wrong'
angry tapir writes "The creator of hypertext has criticized the design of the World Wide Web, saying that Tim Berners-Lee's creation is 'completely wrong,' and that Windows, Macintosh and Linux have 'exactly the same' approach to computing. Ted Nelson, founder of first hypertext project, Project Xanadu, went on to say, 'It is a strange, distorted, peculiar and difficult limited system... the browser is built around invisible links — you can see something to click on but you’ve got nowhere else to go.'"
I think what he's suggesting is this:
Many documents are composed of parts of other documents. If I write an essay I might quote from source texts, scientific papers, other people's work on the subject, interviews I've conducted, etc, and I'll add my own ideas around this. At the moment, I duplicate (retype) any source material and provide a link to it. The material I've linked to doesn't automatically link back. Instead, I could make a link using his system which includes the text from the version of the document I look at, and provides a two-way link.
It's a nice idea, but unless you can make it easy to create documents with all these links (and ensure they don't need any maintenance) I don't see how it would catch on.
Wikipedia's software is close in some respects -- you can include pages (but not, AFAIIA, selected bits of pages) in other pages. There aren't links in the UI, but it would be trivial to add them.
I think the bigger problem with his system is that it would only work if all the source material was kept on the same server. Or at least if there was a common document provider to serve it.
The way the web works today doesn't allow this. Sure, you could fetch some text part from a remote server somewhere, but what if that site goes down? Or what if your document contains 100 snippets from 100 servers? Just imagine the load times.
At least now, when presented with a hyperlink, the user has an expectation that it might be broken, but even then the locally stored text remains accessible.
And then we didn't even mention copyrights...
No. DRM does suck. Definitively and conclusively sucks.
The reasons why it sucks are two:
1 - There is no way it could work. And by that I don't mean any practical, legal or social factor. It simply can't work, the working of our universe doesn't permit DRM to work.
2 - Every human activity must be a hostage of it for we to pretend that it works. The content industry can go to hell, most people think it is way more important to afford real things.
Rethinking email