Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: T. Nelson Critique of Embedded Markup

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:11/9/1999; 9:38:49 AM
Topic:T. Nelson Critique of Embedded Markup
Msg #:12889 (In response to 12886)
Prev/Next:12888 / 12890

Brett Bourne wrote:

am I missing something? or is this topic more about tracking/payment/credit of the expression to an originator from wherever it may go, than about the quality of the expression, itself, of human thought, or the management of the medium of that expression

You're not missing a thing! At the considerable risk of putting words in Nelson's mouth (he and I have met, although I doubt he'd recall), I think it's both: my impression (and it's only an impression) is that Nelson would expect market forces to determine the issue of "quality of the expression." I do think Nelson also believes that a world where anyone could become a properly-compensated publisher would be a great boon to the growth of human thought.

In short, I doubt that Nelson would see the issues "about tracking/payment/credit of the expression to an originator from wherever it may go" and "about the quality of the expression, itself, of human thought, or the management of the medium of that expression" as distinct. If he felt the latter were the only important thing he'd be a lot happier with the web as it stands. If he felt only the former were important he'd have stopped at micropayments on links. Instead he tackled the hard problems in conjoining the two: making a proper research tool where you can see revisions, side-by-side comparisons, etc. while ensuring that the original authors are compensated on a fair-use basis.

I have always found language (for me, English) to be an extremely rich medium

English is a great container/generator, but an absolutely horrid language for specification of anything. The human hallmark of this horridness is the legal system; the intersection of this horridness with the computing world lies at the juncture where programming language behavior is specified in English, with the inevitable result that no two implementations of the programming language work exactly the same way. The most pernicious example of the latter problem is, of course, Java, which was designed by people who knew better but for whatever reason didn't follow through.

provocative and fascinating, my thanks as well

I'm delighted to see Nelson regaining some sociopolitical coin and am more than happy to engage in discussion as to why Nelson's body of work is so extremely important.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:26 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.