8 ms·

Just to point out -- hypertext systems prior to the web almost universally expected permanent stable addresses (and this was, for instance, required by the vari

by enkiv2 11y ago

Just to point out -- hypertext systems prior to the web almost universally expected permanent stable addresses (and this was, for instance, required by the various Xanadu specs). Enquire (Tim Berners-Lee's immediate predecessor to the Web) had permanent stable addresses, too. The web didn't have permanent stable addresses because the web was a hack, intended as a way to explain Enquire to people who didn't have a background in real hypertext systems. (Let the entire existence of the Web, with its myriad flaws, be a lesson to you: your crappiest demo may well become the thing you're known for twenty-five years later, so make sure your crappiest demo doesn't suck as bad as the Web does.)

heydenberk 11y ago
Or, conversely, make sure your crappiest demo is as robust and compelling as the web.
oskarth 11y ago
> (Let the entire existence of the Web, with its myriad flaws, be a lesson to you: your crappiest demo may well become the thing you're known for twenty-five years later, so make sure your crappiest demo doesn't suck as bad as the Web does.) The web is amazing, and you are using it right now. It has flaws, but so does anything that achieves success at the level the Web has. How many technologies have a direct impact on billions of people's lives? There are subtle reasons why "crappy" technology often wins. One is that worse is often better (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) and the second is that people are more prone to complain about popular technologies, which create the illusion that their alternatives would obviously be so much better. EDIT: Note that the web is not just a technological phenomena, it's a social one. If you care about the real world, it doesn't make sense to look at it as a technological innovation in isolation. Anyone can dream up The Perfect Protocol in a research paper, it's an entirely different beast to actually do it and make it work for billions of people.
- tikhonj 11y ago
  A big (biggest?) reason is that popularity is largely independent of quality. Things get popular for lots of reasons heavily affected by the shape of social networks and early choices by a small number of people involved—often based on what they have and have not heard of more than an analysis of what is better or worse. Quality plays a small role at best. This Nautil.us article[1] does a good job of summarizing the relevant research on the issue and references some supporting studies. > My own research has shown that fame has much less to do with intrinsic quality than we believe it does, and much more to do with the characteristics of the people among whom fame spreads. Put another way: the web has a direct impact on billions of people less because it's any good and more because popularity is inherently a power law and it happened to come out ahead. This doesn't invalidate any criticisms of quality! It's perfectly possible if not likely for something popular to be crappy because most things are crappy and that's not enough to stop them from getting popular. Then they require tons of engineering effort and hacks to scale and improve again not because of quality but because of legacy. The web is what's there already, after all! That's how things are, but that doesn't mean it's inevitable or a good state of affairs. I really wish people wouldn't conflate popularity, quality and success. The first two operate on different axes and the last, if it doesn't, should. [1]: http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-trouble-with-fame http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-troubl...
  - oskarth 11y ago
    > Quality plays a small role at best. This is simply not true in the long-term. Good technologies survive because they are useful. Of course quality is not enough to ensure success, but it sure as hell matters for long-term survival. Homer, Shakespeare and the wheel survived because they are very good / useful. Are there lost Homers? Of course there are. Will the Web survive 100 years? I have no idea, and neither do you. A decade? Most likely. Be careful with conflating what is with your idea of what something should be. If you think something sucks and work on making it better, that's great! Keep doing it, and maybe someday we will have something that's even better. But don't diss the popular just because it isn't ticking all of the "it-should-be-this" boxes.
    - 11y ago
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  HTML/HTTP was an improvement over earlier concepts of bidirectional, centralized, reliable hypertext precisely because the links were one directional, hierarchy-free and unstable, and could be put anywhere. The servers belonging to distinct entities weren't coupled. The pages belonging to one entity weren't coupled. It ripped out a lot of politics and baked-in design decisions and let loose creative anarchy.
  - oskarth 11y ago
    Great point. A good example of theory vs practice. I still think Xanadu et al are interesting, but it's instructive to try to understand what the real trade-offs are, the most obvious one being one of shipping speed.
- api 11y ago
  I think a big reason for worse-is-better is that simple "crappy" solutions very often have better evolvability characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability "Elegant and beautiful" systems that are polished and perfect are often also brittle and monolithic and complex. Complex means hard to interoperate with, understand, and re-implement, and brittle means they can't change with the times. Complexity also favors single vendors due to the difficulty of interoperability and understanding. Xanadu would likely have ended up as Xanadu, Inc. with no third party implementations.
noonespecial 11y ago
So what do you call the demo that was delayed a couple of weeks to perfect before releasing? I don't know either.
arethuza 11y ago
I've been using the Web since late '92 and evaluated and selected the Web for a project in '93 where I looked at other hypertext tools. If the Web was a hack then the world could be doing with more hacks.
smacktoward 11y ago
This turned out to be not a bug, but a feature: removing the requirement for permanent, stable addresses made a large-scale hypertext system something that could actually be implemented. (Unlike Xanadu.) Here we are, more than twenty years later, and a hypertext system with permanent, stable addresses is still so rare in the real world that creating one will get you on the front page of Hacker News. The "crappy" Web, meanwhile, is the foundation of modern commerce, culture and communications. If that's crappy, I hope to God I can make something crappy someday.
- enkiv2 11y ago
  The thing is, Xanadu was implemented -- twice, at autodesk, prior to 1990. (It wasn't released for political reasons until 1999.) Please check your facts before saying something clearly untrue like "Xanadu couldn't be implemented". Even if it wasn't -- being a first mover by sacrificing quality can get you greater adoption over superior competitors. Compare the Mac, released in 1984, with the Amiga 1000, released in 1985. By being delayed by a year, the Amiga was able to have all the features that the Mac team wanted but were told that they couldn't have -- color graphics, multitasking, and an actually usable amount of RAM, at about half the price of the Mac. The Mac, on the other hand, was the follow-up to the Lisa, which was technically superior feature-wise but too slow to be usable. Both the Amiga and the Lisa lie forgotten, and people come to believe that the Mac was the first consumer GUI machine or the best consumer GUI machine of its time -- or that its limitations were unavoidable. In reality, a combination of luck and good PR warped our sense of history. The reality is that the web was not the first hypertext system, or the best, and the features that it lacked were implemented and functional in its competition. The web gained a following through a combination of being free (at a time when most hypertext systems, including Xanadu, were proprietary and commercial) and stupid enough that it could be reimplemented poorly by beginner programmers -- which, of course, was its aim. The Web was designed as a model to teach non-programmers the concepts behind Enquire, Tim Berners-Lee's "real" hypertext system. The fact that the web escaped and Enquire didn't is a tragedy. Lots of crappy things become the basis of culture, commerce, and communications. Quality doesn't particularly matter when it comes to being the basis of things, and nuance and complexity work against you if you want wide adoption. But, when something crappy becomes so widespread, its flaws become far more dangerous. Lack of permanent stable addressing made possible the DMCA safe harbor provision (and thus systems like ContentID that delete your content at random on the off-chance that you were quoting somebody famous). Lack of bidirectional links caused the monetization system for the web to be based on advertising. Embedded markup created the need for complex javascript kludges to navigate deeply hierarchical DOM structures in order to perform simple transformation. The web is a long series of poorly thought out decisions, all of which in the end led to both the grey hairs, premature heart attacks, and hefty wallets of people on this site. We're stuck with it now, because we've created a broken system and added structure on top of it to keep it from being fixed. And we, as an industry, profit from its brokenness. But, it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that it isn't broken -- or that the ways in which it was broken were unavoidable. They were avoidable, and they were avoided; it's sheer bad luck that the web was adopted over its superior brethren.
treve 11y ago
Stable links were also part of the earliest ideas for the web, they just failed early. The URL was only intended as the 'locator', the URN was the stable link, and some way had to be found for URN's to be mapped to URL.

by enkiv2 11y ago

heydenberk 11y ago

Or, conversely, make sure your crappiest demo is as robust and compelling as the web.

oskarth 11y ago

> (Let the entire existence of the Web, with its myriad flaws, be a lesson to you: your crappiest demo may well become the thing you're known for twenty-five years later, so make sure your crappiest demo doesn't suck as bad as the Web does.) The web is amazing, and you are using it right now. It has flaws, but so does anything that achieves success at the level the Web has. How many technologies have a direct impact on billions of people's lives? There are subtle reasons why "crappy" technology often wins. One is that worse is often better (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) and the second is that people are more prone to complain about popular technologies, which create the illusion that their alternatives would obviously be so much better. EDIT: Note that the web is not just a technological phenomena, it's a social one. If you care about the real world, it doesn't make sense to look at it as a technological innovation in isolation. Anyone can dream up The Perfect Protocol in a research paper, it's an entirely different beast to actually do it and make it work for billions of people.

tikhonj 11y ago
A big (biggest?) reason is that popularity is largely independent of quality. Things get popular for lots of reasons heavily affected by the shape of social networks and early choices by a small number of people involved—often based on what they have and have not heard of more than an analysis of what is better or worse. Quality plays a small role at best. This Nautil.us article[1] does a good job of summarizing the relevant research on the issue and references some supporting studies. > My own research has shown that fame has much less to do with intrinsic quality than we believe it does, and much more to do with the characteristics of the people among whom fame spreads. Put another way: the web has a direct impact on billions of people less because it's any good and more because popularity is inherently a power law and it happened to come out ahead. This doesn't invalidate any criticisms of quality! It's perfectly possible if not likely for something popular to be crappy because most things are crappy and that's not enough to stop them from getting popular. Then they require tons of engineering effort and hacks to scale and improve again not because of quality but because of legacy. The web is what's there already, after all! That's how things are, but that doesn't mean it's inevitable or a good state of affairs. I really wish people wouldn't conflate popularity, quality and success. The first two operate on different axes and the last, if it doesn't, should. [1]: http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-trouble-with-fame http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-troubl...
- oskarth 11y ago
  > Quality plays a small role at best. This is simply not true in the long-term. Good technologies survive because they are useful. Of course quality is not enough to ensure success, but it sure as hell matters for long-term survival. Homer, Shakespeare and the wheel survived because they are very good / useful. Are there lost Homers? Of course there are. Will the Web survive 100 years? I have no idea, and neither do you. A decade? Most likely. Be careful with conflating what is with your idea of what something should be. If you think something sucks and work on making it better, that's great! Keep doing it, and maybe someday we will have something that's even better. But don't diss the popular just because it isn't ticking all of the "it-should-be-this" boxes.
  - 11y ago
JulianMorrison 11y ago
HTML/HTTP was an improvement over earlier concepts of bidirectional, centralized, reliable hypertext precisely because the links were one directional, hierarchy-free and unstable, and could be put anywhere. The servers belonging to distinct entities weren't coupled. The pages belonging to one entity weren't coupled. It ripped out a lot of politics and baked-in design decisions and let loose creative anarchy.
- oskarth 11y ago
  Great point. A good example of theory vs practice. I still think Xanadu et al are interesting, but it's instructive to try to understand what the real trade-offs are, the most obvious one being one of shipping speed.
api 11y ago
I think a big reason for worse-is-better is that simple "crappy" solutions very often have better evolvability characteristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability "Elegant and beautiful" systems that are polished and perfect are often also brittle and monolithic and complex. Complex means hard to interoperate with, understand, and re-implement, and brittle means they can't change with the times. Complexity also favors single vendors due to the difficulty of interoperability and understanding. Xanadu would likely have ended up as Xanadu, Inc. with no third party implementations.

noonespecial 11y ago

So what do you call the demo that was delayed a couple of weeks to perfect before releasing? I don't know either.

arethuza 11y ago

I've been using the Web since late '92 and evaluated and selected the Web for a project in '93 where I looked at other hypertext tools. If the Web was a hack then the world could be doing with more hacks.

smacktoward 11y ago

This turned out to be not a bug, but a feature: removing the requirement for permanent, stable addresses made a large-scale hypertext system something that could actually be implemented. (Unlike Xanadu.) Here we are, more than twenty years later, and a hypertext system with permanent, stable addresses is still so rare in the real world that creating one will get you on the front page of Hacker News. The "crappy" Web, meanwhile, is the foundation of modern commerce, culture and communications. If that's crappy, I hope to God I can make something crappy someday.

enkiv2 11y ago
The thing is, Xanadu was implemented -- twice, at autodesk, prior to 1990. (It wasn't released for political reasons until 1999.) Please check your facts before saying something clearly untrue like "Xanadu couldn't be implemented". Even if it wasn't -- being a first mover by sacrificing quality can get you greater adoption over superior competitors. Compare the Mac, released in 1984, with the Amiga 1000, released in 1985. By being delayed by a year, the Amiga was able to have all the features that the Mac team wanted but were told that they couldn't have -- color graphics, multitasking, and an actually usable amount of RAM, at about half the price of the Mac. The Mac, on the other hand, was the follow-up to the Lisa, which was technically superior feature-wise but too slow to be usable. Both the Amiga and the Lisa lie forgotten, and people come to believe that the Mac was the first consumer GUI machine or the best consumer GUI machine of its time -- or that its limitations were unavoidable. In reality, a combination of luck and good PR warped our sense of history. The reality is that the web was not the first hypertext system, or the best, and the features that it lacked were implemented and functional in its competition. The web gained a following through a combination of being free (at a time when most hypertext systems, including Xanadu, were proprietary and commercial) and stupid enough that it could be reimplemented poorly by beginner programmers -- which, of course, was its aim. The Web was designed as a model to teach non-programmers the concepts behind Enquire, Tim Berners-Lee's "real" hypertext system. The fact that the web escaped and Enquire didn't is a tragedy. Lots of crappy things become the basis of culture, commerce, and communications. Quality doesn't particularly matter when it comes to being the basis of things, and nuance and complexity work against you if you want wide adoption. But, when something crappy becomes so widespread, its flaws become far more dangerous. Lack of permanent stable addressing made possible the DMCA safe harbor provision (and thus systems like ContentID that delete your content at random on the off-chance that you were quoting somebody famous). Lack of bidirectional links caused the monetization system for the web to be based on advertising. Embedded markup created the need for complex javascript kludges to navigate deeply hierarchical DOM structures in order to perform simple transformation. The web is a long series of poorly thought out decisions, all of which in the end led to both the grey hairs, premature heart attacks, and hefty wallets of people on this site. We're stuck with it now, because we've created a broken system and added structure on top of it to keep it from being fixed. And we, as an industry, profit from its brokenness. But, it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that it isn't broken -- or that the ways in which it was broken were unavoidable. They were avoidable, and they were avoided; it's sheer bad luck that the web was adopted over its superior brethren.

treve 11y ago

Stable links were also part of the earliest ideas for the web, they just failed early. The URL was only intended as the 'locator', the URN was the stable link, and some way had to be found for URN's to be mapped to URL.