Peter.H.M.Brooks@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> Since there is the reference to the BBC article on Tim Berners-Lee
> printed here recently, I hope that this is the right place to ask the
> question!
>
> The BBC suggests that Tim was unhappy with the diluted form of
> hypertext that ended up being the web.
>
> What is missing? Has any of it been clipped on again retrospectively?
> If somebody wanted to fix this problem, what would be required?
Peter: A lot of things. Sir Berners-Lee actually came to hypertext
quite late; the basic ideas were proposed decades before he and
Cailliau put together what was essentially a weekend hack and sent it
out over the 'net.
There are two ways he has been disappointed. First, only a few of his
proposed features for the web were utilized. He and Cailliau coded the
original WWW for a graphical computer called the NeXT (essentially the
precursor to the Macintosh). But few people had graphical machines with
their fancy windows, menus, and fonts. So they put together a little
weekend hack to demonstrate the protocols.
People were so impressed by the weekend project, which actually ran on
their computers, that they didn't really bother to look at the full
project. So when the NCSA and Netscape started making end-user
products, they missed Sir Berners-Lee's major features, like
collaborative writing, graphical editing tools, and such. For this
reason, we still struggle with these issues today.
The second disappointment of Sir Berners-Lee is related to his desire
to make the Web a tool which can be used to find any (accurate)
information one wants, in whatever form one wants it. This latter set
of features, called the Semantic Web, is highly disputed.
Others have also been disappointed with the Web, since it still faces
the major limitations of paper. The vast possibilities for interactive
documents proposed by the Hypertext pioneers (such as Douglas Englebart
and Theodor Holm Nelson) have been supplanted by a chaotic world of
kluge solutions, broken software, and browser wars.
What sort of features are important to these people, and to those who
continue to pursue hypertext research? We are often quite interested in
creating new ways to read, write, and work with information, in finding
ways to collaborate on creative projects electronically, on systems
which intelligently archive the creative process and the history of
creative works; we work on ways to electronically quote and excerpt
others' works in ways that maintain a sense of context.
To get a glimpse of the sort of things which one might hope become
widespread, you may wish to take a look at software such as Tinderbox
and Storyspace, by Eastgate Systems (www.eastgate.com) or take a peek
at a recent project of mine involved in Stretchtext
(http://www.natematias.com/test/margin/).
Other good work is being done
at the University of Southampton (mc Shraefel, David Millard, Les Carr,
Wendy Hall), Texas A&M (Shipman & Marshall), Oxford University (Sir
Theodor Holm Nelson, via the Oxford Internet Institute), and many, many
other places.
I hope this helps,
--J. Nathan Matias
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