[ih] what is and isn't the web, was Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol

[johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)]

>>> In fact, hypertext specialists thought it was broken; 
>
>The academics working on hypertext thought that a hypertext system
>without bidirectional links and some kind of continuous completeness
>checking (so that dead links would vanish automatically) wasn't
>useful.

Ted Nelson sure did.  Indeed, he still does, and he's still trying
to implement something more like what he had in mind all along.

>Tim made a very strong argument that a system with bidirectional links
>and consistency checks was undeployable at large scale, and of course
>he was right.

As far as I can tell, none of the previous hypertext designs seriously
thought about a system where everything wasn't more or less under the
same management.

R's,
John