Ted Nelson had many pioneering ideas, but we need to acknowledge that many of them _didn't work_. Not because Tim Berners-Lee lacked the time to code them, but

Ted Nelson had many pioneering ideas, but we need to acknowledge that many of them _didn't work_. Not because Tim Berners-Lee lacked the time to code them, but they just couldn't _ever_ work. Nelson was 30 years late delivering Project Xanadu when Berners-Lee jettisoned the _impossible_ parts of Ted's vision and ate his lunch with the WorldWideWeb. [0] Ted dreamed of these bidirectional links. Not just that you got _notified_ if someone linked to you, for which we have pingbacks (which are massively exploitable for spam if you auto-publish them), but if someone changed their document's address or title, they'd have the power to update _your_ document with the link to it. No bitrot! All it takes is one entity having complete executive control over the entire WWW, and probably the ability to change anything on any page without your knowledge, or even better, give remote control of your documents to anyone who controls the server you happen to link to. He had other ideas, like you'd write a page and get automatically paid micropayments by any people reading it, and if anyone wanted to excerpt a section or an image and transclude it in their page, they could do that and you'd get paid your share. Universally monetizing the web would have strangled the information revolution in the crib. It'd be like putting a coin slot on your computer terminal a-la Ubik. People would _avoid_ reading pages to avoid getting billed, they'd be easily swayed to centralised providers offering free access to their pages (because what they really want is power and influence) like Facebook Zero cynically did to India. There'd also need to be, for billing, a perfect record of absolutely everything that anyone ever read, and anyone ever published. It'd be an authoritarian's wet dream. If you haven't read The Curse of Xanadu, [0], I urge that you do, and be willing to ditch ideas that don't work so people can benefit all the sooner from ideas that do, and other people don't beat you to the punch _thirty years_ after you started. [0] https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/