I recently re-read his book Literary Machines after first reading it in the late 80s, and it struck me how simultaneously visionary and impractical his ideas were. His version of the web was centralized(), with the organisation running it covering its costs by franchising-out access points. yes, it had transclusion and versioning, but it also had rights management and automatic billing for quoting (transcluding) other people's work - all imposed by a central authority that owned the entire "web".
( it had to be centralised, otherwise the contract necessary for transclusion would not work in the real world)
Nelson is a very smart visionary, but I'm glad we ended-up with the messy, decentralised web we have today.
Awesome, that is interesting - I was not aware of that. I was looking around to see if I could find his book. I found a PDF - don't think it's the entirety - but will give it a read this weekend.
I wonder if some kind of medium ground could be put together. Thanks for that article, I'll check that out!
The book is hard to get hold of now. There are used copies on Amazon, but the prices are stupidly high. I bought a dead-tree edition from Eastgate Systems [1] a few years ago at a reasonable price, but it seems to be out of stock now.
( it had to be centralised, otherwise the contract necessary for transclusion would not work in the real world)
Nelson is a very smart visionary, but I'm glad we ended-up with the messy, decentralised web we have today.
Obligatory link to The Curse of Xanadu at Wired, back in the day: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html. A real hacker nightmare story.