If you want a general term for this sort of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StretchText. (The original note describing the concept: http://i.imgur.com/jOCOQGI.png)
It's difficult to even imagine how few people were thinking of such things when they were so far removed everyday life and culture.
Tim Berners-Lee I thought was much more well known for starting a revolution with the world wide web. I hate to say but the web seems a bit less of an insight when you know that Hypertext had already been so well established for almost 25 years.
Ted Nelson's idea was/is called "Xanadu":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
The Xanadu vision is centered on a hypertext system, like the Web. But unlike the Web, it also includes such things as:
- A mechanism for embedding live documents within other documents ("transclusion": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion)
- Bidirectional links, that updated themselves automatically when the address of the linked document changed (see http://dubinko.info/blog/2009/11/22/how-xanadu-works/)
- An addressing system that goes beyond just documents to let you link directly to any range of content you wish ("tumblers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumbler_(Project_Xanadu))
- Automatic, redundant cross-network storage of all documents (a built-in Wayback Machine)
- A micropayments system for content creators to sell access to what they create
- Strong identity built in (a necessity if you want to also have payments built in)
... and much more.
Xanadu is (in theory anyway) a much more sophisticated system than the Web is even today, never mind the Web as it was when TBL first designed it. Back then it was so much more crude than Xanadu as to barely merit comparison.
But in a way that was TBL's genius, because, while the Web was much more crude than Xanadu architecturally, it was something that could actually be implemented with the early-'90s technology he had on hand. Xanadu, a much grander vision, was so much grander that it has defied fifty years' worth of efforts to implement it. (Back when Wired was worth reading, they ran a good piece on the state of those efforts circa 1995: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ It's still defying implementation today, more than twenty years later.)
So we ended up with the Web we have, which kinda sorta works except for all the ways that it really doesn't. (Paying content creators, for instance.) Ted Nelson saw all those problems coming, all the way back in 1960, and he tried to come up with a system that would head them all off. He hasn't succeeded (not yet, anyway!), but you have to admire both the vision and the attempt.
Though when dealing with people who reject "worse is better", remember that some people may not grasp the idea, but others may grasp it very well and just consider it a bad thing - a problem to work around.
> "Worse is better" has nothing to do with it. Stop saying it every time anything you think is bad comes up. It's incredibly arrogant, the way people basically spam "worse is better" like they're in Twitch chat every time C, Unix, HTTP, or anything else that they perceive as imperfect comes up.
It didn't occur to me that I was being offensive.
Both styles can offer so much to humanity, but I'd bet most entrepreneurs would go with Edison as a cofounder before Nelson.
Today an attempt at such a thing would probably be demonized as DRM..
I guess this is why you need imagination, and to not stifle it.
But for this to work, you'd have to have a history/scope of your current knowledge.
A nice example: http://www.telescopictext.com/
Off topic but why send text to Imgur?