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Book
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Mister Moo 🐮
Robin Adams
skry

@robinadams @book @impactology I went to Hypertext ’97, and they were still arguing about whether to pay attention to the WWW. Great conference nonetheless.

By then I’d had a popular website for 3 years so I considered that stance to be ludicrous even then. They wrote interactive fiction and software to do it with.

They were butthurt about backlinks and transclusion. (Who could blame them?) And here it is, immortalized by…you guessed it:

web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/

@robinadams @book @impactology I went to Hypertext ’97, and they were still arguing about whether to pay attention to the WWW. Great conference nonetheless.

By then I’d had a popular website for 3 years so I considered that stance to be ludicrous even then. They wrote interactive fiction and software to do it with.

18 September at 3:47 | Open on mastodon.social
Tom Walker

@skry @robinadams @book @impactology It's really interesting to me that theorists of a field would be witnessing an implementation massively taking off in practice and yet not embracing it because it did not properly conform to the theory

18 September at 9:19 | Open on mastodon.social
skry

@tomw @robinadams @book @impactology I was intrigued too. TBL was Doing It Wrong, plus he apparently wasn’t a proper hypermedia academic.

It was partly I think alignment with Ted Nelson and partly being appalled that TBL’s worldwide hack was going viral without benefit of all the research they had done. Hell, it wasn’t even proper SGML. They awaited its inevitable death by hubris.

18 September at 9:50 | Open on mastodon.social
Raghav Agrawal

@skry @tomw @robinadams @book

they couldn't fathom how he was going viral? 😅

18 September at 9:51 | Open on mastodon.social
skry
Steve Dunham

@skry @impactology @tomw @robinadams @book Yeah, it's a bit of a "worse is better situation". Or perhaps Alan Kay's "perspective is worth 80 IQ points".

18 September at 14:56 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
skry

@dunhamsteve @impactology @tomw @robinadams @book They had 10 years of various experimental systems that typically ran on one OS, with almost no users except themselves.

18 September at 19:01 | Open on mastodon.social
Raghav Agrawal

@robinadams @book

How terribly wrong Mark Frisse turned out to be. Mark simply didn't have the foresight and imagination needed to see far reaching consequences of Tim's idea.

archive.org/details/Munnecke-M

Mark Frisse's Message to Tim Berners-Lee Item Size 133.6M Mark Frisse, now of Vanderbilt University, was one of the reviewers of Tim Berners-Lee's original paper presenting the concepts behind the World Wide Web in 1989.  Mark describes how he thought that the architecture would not scale, and that Tim's decision to allow "broken" pointers (i.e. violate bidirectional integrity) would lead to a "spaghetti bowl of gotos."  Tim's paper was relegated to a poster session, which turned out to be wildly successful.  Tim's decision to relax the requirement for bidirectional integrity (allowing 404 not found error) turned out to be one key features for the success of the web.Â
18 September at 5:56 | Open on mastodon.social
Lion abt not making pride puns

@robinadams @book @impactology I mean, the Web is a basic and not particularly novel hypermedia system, so this isn't surprising. The client-agnostic data bus, since effectively wiped out by the Web Platform; and embracing as inevitable, rather than trying so hard to avoid, broken links were it's main distinguishing features IIRC.

It was successful because it was free and open and just bad enough, much like Linux.

18 September at 8:25 | Open on plush.city
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