Digital knowledge management tools envisioned in the 1950s and 60s such as Douglas Engelbart’s hyperdocument system has not been fully implemented (to my knowledge) and certainly not widely embraced. The World Wide Web failed to implement key features from Engelbart’s proposal such as the ability to directly address arbitrary sub-documents, or the ability to live embed a sub-document inside another document.
Similarly both Engelbart and Ted Nelson emphasized the importance of hyperlinks being two-directional so that the link is browsable from both the source and the target document. In other words, you could look at any webpage and immediately see all the pages that link to that page. However, Tim Berners-Lee chose to make web hyperlinks one directional from source to target, and we are still stuck with that limitation today. Google’s PageRank algorithm gets around this by doing massive crawling the web and then tracing the back-links through the network, but back-links could have been built into the web as a basic feature available to everybody.
Digital knowledge management tools envisioned in the 1950s and 60s such as Douglas Engelbart’s hyperdocument system has not been fully implemented (to my knowledge) and certainly not widely embraced. The World Wide Web failed to implement key features from Engelbart’s proposal such as the ability to directly address arbitrary sub-documents, or the ability to live embed a sub-document inside another document.
Similarly both Engelbart and Ted Nelson emphasized the importance of hyperlinks being two-directional so that the link is browsable from both the source and the target document. In other words, you could look at any webpage and immediately see all the pages that link to that page. However, Tim Berners-Lee chose to make web hyperlinks one directional from source to target, and we are still stuck with that limitation today. Google’s PageRank algorithm gets around this by doing massive crawling the web and then tracing the back-links through the network, but back-links could have been built into the web as a basic feature available to everybody.
https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/156/88/