[HN Gopher] Ted Nelson remembers Englebart 5/11/2022 4PM-5PM Pac...
___________________________________________________________________
Ted Nelson remembers Englebart 5/11/2022 4PM-5PM Pacific
Author : drallison
Score : 6 points
Date : 2022-05-10 18:03 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ee380.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (ee380.stanford.edu)
| drallison wrote:
| Ted Nelson's vision and inventive genius helped create today's
| Internet. Englebart and the Augment Project at SRI made some of
| the vision real.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Will definitely be watching this!
|
| As I understand it Nelson's vision is still not grasped today.
|
| His original hyperlink was _bi-directional_.
|
| Pause and think about that for a moment.
|
| In practice, at the time, the target in a client-server
| implementation had no way to store "return" links pointing to it.
| The WWW could not rise to Nelson's ambition. Maybe that's changed
| today, and we could certainly rewrite servers or create a more
| peer-oriented way of going about things.
|
| The upshot is a totally changed "Web", in which search is
| fundamentally different from a centralised index a-la Google.
| leobg wrote:
| Not sure I understand. Can you explain? How would a
| bidirectional link work? What would be an example? And how
| would that free us from the need for centralized search
| engines, for example? I ask not because I doubt, but because I
| have a hunch that you may be right. Thanks!
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Yes it's a profound concept isn't it.
|
| I suppose there's three things to talk about. Ted Nelson. The
| idea. Possible implementation.
|
| First, Ted.
|
| He's clearly a genius, also the type who has a lot of magical
| thinking. Which I mean that in a mostly good way.
|
| Then there's the theory. Graph theory. The WWW (basic
| concept) is an ephemeral directed graph under asymmetrical
| navigation, such that sources are initiated by clients
| (requests) to destinations on listening servers
| (respondents). It's a stateless static document model, and
| within a document the outdegree is the (known) number of
| links in a document, and the indegree is the (unknown) number
| of all other links in documents out there that point to it.
| Links are just text strings (URLS).
|
| As it stands the only way to know the indegree is to spider
| all documents exhaustively and count. Larry Page's "rank" did
| this, giving a rough metric of how "important" a document was
| by its popularity (indegree), which launched Google.
|
| As I understood it, Ted wanted links that were containers of
| other links that referred to them. The server would somehow
| need to watch for these coming in, and remember them. The
| upshot is a much richer information space.
|
| Implementation. Can-o-worms. What happens if a million pages
| refer to yours? How to prune dead return links? How to trust
| servers to be honest? It's completely different
| privacy/visibility universe.
|
| So I think it's just a theoretical pipe dream.
|
| But I hope I may be proved wrong by really smart people. I
| think the key is to move away from client-server to something
| a bit more flattened, perhaps with IPFS or suchlike
| underneath. Who knows.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-10 23:02 UTC)