> [...] try to understand why we had an enormous degradation in the 1990s
> and 2000s, and why we are enjoying hypertext systems renaissance now.
I fully disagree with the author's assertions about the current state of hypertext being better than the 90's and 00's.
The 90's and 00's were peak hypertext: authoring, personal webpages, microformats, RSS/Atom, wikis, semantic web, P2P with DHTs and links, search engines, etc. The future of hypertext seemed boundless at this point.
What we have now are a proliferation of walled gardens with thin client interfaces exposed as JS/SPA applications. Databases with ads and engagement algorithms. Hypertext doesn't seem like a promising future, just a delivery shell to build your product.
Agree. The 90's and early/mid 00's Web brought most community-driven innovations in UI and community interaction idioms that the few sites of today's centralized Web merely rehash. And evolution in markup languages was envisioned to liberate users from proprietary and idiosyncratic front-end tech. It wasn't the Web that brought this to an end, but the power grab of "browser vendors" coupled with the naivite/corruptness of 2010's startup scene.
Always interesting to see some hypertext history. I have a personal connection to KMS, so it was interesting to see that although it wasn't mentioned in the article, it was included in the references - just like in the original WWW proposal. ( https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html , although maybe the reference was lost in the HTMLization )
KMS was a a multiuser networked read/write hypertext system, a commercial spinoff of a CMU project from the 70's called ZOG.
Another major hypertext authoring tool of the 1980s not mentioned here is Storyspace, which was the emerging standard for reading and creating works of literary hypertext fiction. If you’ve never heard of any of these works—which were something of a Big Deal in the late 80s and early 90s—that’s because a) most of these works are hard to access on any modern platform on which you’d want to read a whole book (Eastgate is very much to blame for this), and b) they tend to exhibit the worst of the modish, academia-adjacent literary trends of this End of History period, in my biased opinion. They are, however, of interest from the perspective of digital arts history, and it’s a shame that they aren’t easier to access.
When hypertext fiction underwent a small revival in the 2010s via the free software Twine, many of the participating authors had no idea that they were often reinventing the wheel. But how could they have any sense of hypertext fiction as a historical practice, when their antecedents had practically vanished from the record?
Please, whoever wrote this go and do some more research and rewrite the Ted vs WWW, he was right, it was complicated, it still is, does not mean he was not right, also it's there, you can go and download the release and work on it, if you want, here's an introduction to get it running, YMMV https://gist.github.com/ldodds/a7f901c7f0118e83a645
Thank goodness for this article. I had seen a few of these tools and have been thinking about this topic for a while, but I could not for the life of me remember the names of some of the inventors or products, in particular Xanadu. Now I have it back thanks to this!
There is a lot of meaty stuff to be had in this topic that I think we would all do well to understand as we make things.
Its Wikipedia entry says that it was developed using an (unnamed) toolkit and required A/UX 1.1, so it probably wasn't particularly portable. I'm sure the source code exists somewhere, but the effort involved in resurrecting it would seem to be considerable.
The 90's and 00's were peak hypertext: authoring, personal webpages, microformats, RSS/Atom, wikis, semantic web, P2P with DHTs and links, search engines, etc. The future of hypertext seemed boundless at this point.
What we have now are a proliferation of walled gardens with thin client interfaces exposed as JS/SPA applications. Databases with ads and engagement algorithms. Hypertext doesn't seem like a promising future, just a delivery shell to build your product.