- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 07:31:23 +0000 (GMT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
> [1] http://xanadu.com/xuTheModel/ Although this claims a very long association with hypertext, on a quick scan, I couldn't find any of the detailed history of that involvment that would have convinced me that they were the prime movers for the concept, as generally understood. Moreover, whilst the thesis on the page referenced is that the problem is with the standards, I think the real problem is with the users. For example, there is just no committment from commercial page developers to avoid link rot (many don't even provide documentation on non-current products and Microsoft is notorious for having links with very short lifetimes). Also, even by my definition of hypertext, most web pages (i.e. the vast majority of vanity and commercial ones) are not hypertext. I say that on the basis that I don't consider lists of links that are not embedded in the body text and embedded links of the form "click here" to be true hypertext. We've already touched on copyright. My impression is that the desire of most businesses is to try to give less rights than are given by statute, rather than more, and, often, to use technical means to achieve that. My feeling is that the demand for their sort of hypertext would be limited to some technology companies, where there was strong managament commitment, and only for intranet use, and the sort of academic and semi-academic users who currently generate valid HTML. It would therefore be a relatively small niche.
Received on Tuesday, 30 January 2007 07:31:33 UTC