[ih] "The Internet runs on Proposed Standards"

[Dave Crocker]

On 12/3/2022 9:16 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> Soon after HTML and HTTP made their debuts, I attended a seminar
> at CERN by Frank Kappe, a student of Hermann Maurer at TU Graz,
> Austria, about the Hyper-G project. 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? 


A linguistic debate about the use of the word hypertext with and without 
2-way links is good for academic energy.  Much like debating when the 
Internet started...

But a more interesting architectural issue is the old 'tussles' 
concern.  The challenge about consistency is demonstrably real. But so 
is the challenge to maintaineverse pointers.

Arguably what the web did was to pare down to an immutable core, leaving 
the additional bit -- reverse pointsers -- to be done as a value-added 
layer.  It doesn't deny the utility of the latter, but did not require 
solving their design as a roadblock to use of forward pointers.

It's not as if this integrate vs. divide-and-conquor debate is unusual, 
nor is the latter's proving operationally (vastly) superior.


d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social