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

Re: Where's Ted Nelson?

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:11/16/1999; 8:48:14 PM
Topic:CallTheShots.com
Msg #:13123 (In response to 13121)
Prev/Next:13122 / 13124

Bill Humphries wrote:

He'll be laughing hard when he sees this. These are the sort of institutional problems his "transcopyright" or whatever he calls it address.

Unless we want to get into a site-scraping-prevention arms race, we'd better get working on micropayments so everyone can be compensated for the views of their page widgets.

Precisely. The Web and Xanadu stand in opposite corners of a thorny philosophical dilemma: given a challenge/opportunity, do you try to think through all the ramifications, design something that's as near to perfect as you can, and not ship until you're done (Xanadu) or do you do the simplest thing that addresses 75% of what you need, ship that, and address the issues that arise by grafting stuff onto the existing protocols/code (the Web)?

Personally I've come to feel that both approaches have validity, but what continues to chap my hide is when the adherents/promoters of the latter approach seem so surprised when it turns out that their "simple" solutions only cover 75% of what's needed, if that much, when there's an existing body of documentation that says, in effect, here's what's needed and here's why it's hard.

In other words, I don't mind people saying "we're not gonna tackle the hard stuff right now; we're just gonna build the easy part and deliver that and see what happens afterwards." I do mind people saying "What hard part?" or "No one really needs the hard part anyway." Unfortunately, it's the latter type of thinking that seems to dominate the Web at the moment.

The flip side of the coin is, as I've written before, it does seem as if some people's current pain is bringing some much-needed attention back to Nelson's work. It's about time.

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