Re: forwarded... [Explicit Linking is Impossible]

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Wed, 5 May 93 17:59:45 -0500


aronsson@lysator.liu.se writes:
> I don't know, Marc, what your seemingly sarcastic two line remark
> means. If you mean tbat maintaining hypertext links within large
> collections of texts is easy and affordable, if you have good tools
> for this, perhaps you could enlighten me and other people about
> this?

It was just a joke... fyi, I'm an ex-IBM'er, and it amuses me greatly
to see the "we can do anything, and if we can't, it's not possible"
mentality still in action.

No, I don't think that maintaining hypertext links within large
collections of texts is currently easy and quote-unquote affordable,
and I don't have any magic tools, but that has nothing to do with
whether or not such a task is "impossible". Limitations of current
technology should not be extrapolated to judge possibility or
impossibility; I would have thought the Wright brothers taught us that
principle some time ago.

Pardon, however, the humor,
Marc