HTML aims too low: what web connectivity should have been

What’s so complicated about text? Your whole nervous system, that’s all.

In what’s both a short history of writing for the web and a summary of how innovators are thinking about writing now, local scribe Paul Ford penned the remarkable “As We May Type” for the MIT Technology Review.

From the article:

Not long ago, Ted Nelson, a complex and influential thinker who carried the flame of hypertext for decades before the Web existed, gave a talk at MoMA PS1 in Queens, a satellite of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It was a melancholy reflection upon the failure to realize the humanist ideal of computing.

“I don’t know anybody from my generation of computer people that has adapted,” he said in his talk, “because we all had original visions.” Nelson’s vision is of a system called Xanadu, composed of interconnected documents; any part of any document would be able to connect to any other part, and writers would be compensated with tiny payments as their work was read. He loathes the now-­dominant formats—HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Word—for aiming so low.

[MIT Technology Review]