natematias@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> 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.
>
Yes, very much, thank you!
It's quite understandable, in its sad way, too. 'SMTP', after all, for
example, starts with the 'S' for 'Simple' because the real version was
too baroque for the time - for the time yes, but now it would be
extremely helpful and not difficult to impliment in hardware or
software.
I'm all for simplicity myself, but it can get too embedded in things,
as you say. There's also the difficult (shown by people like Gartner in
their life-cycles of things) in spending too long perfecting the theory
before getting something to work - just as there is a similar mistake
in kicking out a hack before you have enouth theory for it to be
useful.
Thanks for the references, though, I'll go and look at those. I do have
a very practical application in mind that I'm hoping to be working on
soon!
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