A history of the world wide web, with some important lessons for software architects of today. Ted Nelson's ideas for a deeply hyperlinked future were brilliant, useful, and a perfect fit for the way we express and share knowledge, and yet they were superseded by Tim Berners-Lee's simpler, more-fragile and pragmatic approach. So are we stuck with the inferior web that we have? Perhaps not. Great ideas have a habit of failing when the innovation leap is too great and then resurrecting themselves in smaller steps later.