OpenDoc represented a gigantic attempt to create a document-centric apps-are-just-services framework that consumed hundreds of person-years of the "best and bri

OpenDoc represented a gigantic attempt to create a document-centric apps-are-just-services framework that consumed hundreds of person-years of the "best and brightest" and produced nothing much useful. And then there was Taligent. Ted Nelson's vision is attractive and brilliant and fundamentally misguided. I remember reading one of his pieces on hypertext and how there was this idea of everything being, in essence, part of a disambiguated database of information so that any version of, say, Macbeth, would be linked to the canonical Macbeth... And I thought -- hang on, does he not realize that when it comes to almost any creative work there is no canonical version ever? (Actually at the time I thought Shakespeare's works -- where we don't have any of his original manuscripts in most cases and rely on warring fragments of revisions -- was unusual, but in fact almost anything has these issues of provenance, even in the wholly digital world.)