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Compendium:
Hypertext guru: Webmasters bite
 
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And yet, his work largely goes unrecognized. Perhaps it's because, like GNU guru Richard Stallman in his eternal struggle with Linus Torvalds, Stallman has fixated on some asymptotic ideal without caring about whether things actually work for normal people.
In his latest epistle, Nelson once again derides the Web:
The Web isn't hypertext, it's DECORATED DIRECTORIES!What we have instead is the vacuous victory of typesetters over authors, and the most trivial form of hypertext that could have been imagined.
[T]oday's nightmarish new world is controlled by "webmasters", tekkies unlikely to understand the niceties of text issues and preoccupied with the Web's exploding alphabet soup of embedded formats. XML is not an improvement but a hierarchy hamburger. Everything, everything must be forced into hierarchical templates! And the "semantic web" means that tekkie committees will decide the world's true concepts for once and for all. Enforcement is going to be another problem :) It is a very strange way of thinking, but all too many people are buying in because they think that's how it must be.
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