just rewatched hyperland, douglas adams' 1990 (ie the web effectively didn't exist yet) documentary about hypermedia https://youtu.be/1iAJPoc23-M
it's crazy how hypercard and storyspace were both made in 1987 and tbl hadn't even finished his prototype by the time adams made that documentary
i do not have a good mental inventory of pre-web hypermedia systems but i've used both hypercard and storyspace and my assessment is they are much *denser* than the web (at least out of the box)
@doriantaylor I suspect some of this was a product of 512×384 screens. Classic constraint stuff.
@vruba srslytho i think back to my experience with bleaching off the template/nav of a website and being faced down by twelve thousand might-as-well-be-word-docs
@doriantaylor There’s this story that Kissinger, in Beijing 1972, asked Zhōu Ēnlái what he thought of the French Revolution, and Zhōu said “It’s too soon to tell.” Kissinger told this story as an example of taking the long view. But later accounts suggest that the question was translated as referring to the 1968 protests in France. Either way, when it comes to whether CSS was a mistake, I think it’s too soon to tell.
@vruba i dunno i'd argue certain indelible initial structural decisions of the web give it certain affordances that bias it for sparsity, ie big documents few links
@vruba and like you can set a new floor (literally what i'm working on right now) but it's always gonna be out of equilibrium
@doriantaylor @vruba might be heavily affected by browser monoculture. And many people's tendency to maximize window size.
@vruba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse