[ih] what is hypertext, was "The Internet runs on Proposed Standards"

[John Levine]

It appears that Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> said:
>... Their strongly expressed opinion
>was that the Web was useless as a hypertext project because (unlike
>Hyper-G) it did not have rigorous two-way hyperlinks. They maintained
>that an unmanaged hypertext system in which A could point to B but
>B didn't know about it and have a reverse pointer to A was useless.
>How could it possibly be managed and kept consistent?

Seems that this is a matter of nomenclature. Ted Nelson had been
working on hypertext projects since the late 1960s and always said
that all the links were two-way. He planned for a lot of other stuff
that would have been great if it were possible, like links to a
subrange of a document (how does that work if the target is updated?)
and micropayments to authors per byte viewed.

They were right, WWW doesn't do that, and by that definition it's not
real hypertext. But Tim picked a subset that was large enough to be
useful, even with one-way links that sometimes point nowhere, and
small enough to be implemnted at scale.  

Ted is still grumpy about the Web, but I still have no idea how you
would implement a lot of that stuff.

R's,
John