Glenn's Blog

In this morning’s lecture, Adrian Miles spoke about Ted Nelson and some of his concepts and words.

Ted Nelson is the person who first coined the term hypertext. However, the actuality of the world wide web and specifically the allowances of HTML are quite different to his vision of hypertext. Nelson said:

HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT– ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management. (1999)

This quote shows some of the main points that Adrian made about Nelson.

Ted Nelson says that knowledge does not come in discreet baskets, rather, it is fundamentally interlinked, or interwingled. This means that hypertext is the perfect format for knowledge to be recorded in. However, unlike the links between knowledge itself, links between information online only go one way, and Nelson has a big problem with this fact. I’m struggling to see how this can possibly be fixed though.

Nelson also says that instead of simply copying and pasting content from one place to another, like I did with the quote above, we should transclude them. We’ve been transcluding images and video for a long time. With images we call it hotlinking, and with video it’s embedding. But there’s not equivalent for text. Yet.

Ted Nelson despises URLs because they so often just do not work. If someone moves the information you were linking to, your link becomes broken and worthless. Thinking about this, I’ve noticed that the name URL is a bit of a lie. When I imagine a Universal Resource Locator, I think of something that will find me an object, or resource wherever it is in the universe. This isn’t what URLs are at all. They just point to one single location in the universe of the internet and hopes that the resource you want is still there. They’d be more accurately described as Universal Location Locators. This problem with the name is exactly the same problem with the technology itself.

Adrian said that if we link to a page on our blogs, the writer of that page won’t know. But this isn’t entirely true. When we link to a blog post, we automatically notify the writer of the post using pingbacks if they are also using WordPress, or trackbacks for some other platforms.

Perhaps the most important thing that Adrian said in the lecture this morning was the reason we need to learn code. He said (paraphrased) that as media creators, if we do not learn at least a little about and of code, we’ll be slaves to the codewriters when we work in an online environment. If we cannot code a something the way that we want it ourselves, we’ll need to get someone else to do it for us, which then removes a lot of the control we would have otherwise had over our product. If we cannot even understand the ideas of coding, we won’t be able to speak properly with coders, and will have less input into our own content. We need to share some sort of history with the coders we work with for us to be able to create what we want.

My response to Adrian’s delivery of the lecture can be found here.