~25 years ago, when the web was pretty new, I saw Ted Nelson give a talk about it. He was angry that it took so long for the world to wake up and hear the gospel of hypertext. And he was outraged and disappointed that the web didn't implement his vision of hypertext. Links should be two-way! The platform should treat intellectual property as a first-class concept! There should be attributions or royalties (or something, forgot the details)! And it did none of that!
I was tempted to laugh it off and dismiss him as just an envious nutcase, but then I realized something: his vision actually did have a lot of neat ideas in it. I came to the conclusion that Ted Nelson is a creative thinker, who had been way ahead of his time in certain ways. To me, it would be a mistake to not listen to him at all. It would also be a mistake to listen without a huge amount of skepticism.
Xanadu sounds like a first class example of Raymond's Cathedral and Bazaar, with Ted as high priest. Perhaps if he'd gotten his hands dirtier earlier, he'd have better appreciated the impractical demerits of all such grand designs.
Surely once the number of hyperlinks grew past the thousand mark (in 1991?), their further exponential growth made it clear that the manual curation of link semantics of any kind was hopelessly infeasible. Some 30 years hence, I'm surprised such windmills are still tilted at.
I was tempted to laugh it off and dismiss him as just an envious nutcase, but then I realized something: his vision actually did have a lot of neat ideas in it. I came to the conclusion that Ted Nelson is a creative thinker, who had been way ahead of his time in certain ways. To me, it would be a mistake to not listen to him at all. It would also be a mistake to listen without a huge amount of skepticism.