"What we now call the browser is whatever defines the web. What fits in the browser is the World Wide Web and a number of trivial standards to handle that so that the content comes"
About this Quote
Nelson is doing that very Ted Nelson thing: naming the trap while you are still admiring the cheese. By declaring the browser "whatever defines the web", he flips the usual story of neutral tools delivering an independent medium. The subtext is blunt: the browser is not a window onto the web; it is the constitution of the web. If you control the browser, you control what "the web" even is.
The second sentence is where the cynicism sharpens into critique. Calling the web a "number of trivial standards" is not ignorance; it's a jab at how small technical decisions quietly become cultural law. "Trivial" here means deceptively mundane: URL structure, markup conventions, security models, media codecs, scripting behaviors. These details don’t just "handle" content. They dictate what kinds of ideas can be expressed, how they can be linked, how they can be preserved, and who gets paid.
Context matters. Nelson, the original hypertext contrarian, spent decades arguing that the web as implemented (one-way links, weak transclusion, no native rights/attribution/payment) was a compromised version of what networked text could be. So when he says "so that the content comes", you can hear the sigh: the web has become a delivery pipeline, optimized for getting stuff to screens, not for maintaining relationships between pieces of knowledge over time.
It’s a warning wrapped in a definition: the "open web" lives or dies by what browsers choose to make real.
The second sentence is where the cynicism sharpens into critique. Calling the web a "number of trivial standards" is not ignorance; it's a jab at how small technical decisions quietly become cultural law. "Trivial" here means deceptively mundane: URL structure, markup conventions, security models, media codecs, scripting behaviors. These details don’t just "handle" content. They dictate what kinds of ideas can be expressed, how they can be linked, how they can be preserved, and who gets paid.
Context matters. Nelson, the original hypertext contrarian, spent decades arguing that the web as implemented (one-way links, weak transclusion, no native rights/attribution/payment) was a compromised version of what networked text could be. So when he says "so that the content comes", you can hear the sigh: the web has become a delivery pipeline, optimized for getting stuff to screens, not for maintaining relationships between pieces of knowledge over time.
It’s a warning wrapped in a definition: the "open web" lives or dies by what browsers choose to make real.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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