Ted Nelson visited Google on January 29th and spoke about his vision of the use of hypertext, a term that he was the first to coin, and publish.
The title of his talk is Transclusion: Fixing Electronic Literature. It shows a very different vision of what something like the World Wide Web might have evolved as.
In this use of hypertext, links (not html embedded links, which he apologizes for) don’t break, concepts behind copyright are turned on their sides, documents can be easily compared side-by-side, and versions of documents are managed in a way that html doesn’t.
The Wikipedia article on Ted Nelson links to some interesting articles, though it doesn’t mention some of his present day efforts which are mentioned during the presentation.
Could this type of transclusion (documents including sections of other documents by reference) be somewhere in the future of electronic documents at Google?
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