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Mr Nelson looms large over XML, in person and never as a ghost, because we are all too cowardly to admit he is completely right. Indeed, his critique applies not merely to XML and to the Web but, as any casual student of his writings can see, to computing practice everywhere. It certainly applies to databases as much as XML.
As its core, Ted Nelson is right because we are forced by existing tools to put things in disjoint categories and are forced by the same to make premature decisions about how things should be classified. My view is that Mr Nelson argues for the ultimate late binding, to use programming language terminology. If we don't don't if a certain person is male or female, why should our software force us into one, the other, or "Other" until we truly know? Why can't it simply tolerate the ambiguity? That's but an example of the many things Mr Nelson would like to see, I think.
We applaud slogans like "There's more than one way to do it" but why don't we actually embrace those in our structures and our designs? Not only must there be more than one way to do it, there must be many ways to see things, most not predictable or pre-canned.
Ted Nelson is not the only visionary who's seen there's something really wrong here. E F Codd saw it in 1969, as well, as quoted by C J Date:
[T]he user would be able to access a given
relation using any combination of its attributes
as knowns and the remaining ones as unknowns.
"This" [said Codd] "is a system feature [that
is] missing from many current information
systems."
(From page 15, C J Date, THE DATABASE RELATIONAL MODEL, 2001, ISBN 0-201-61294-1.) Most existing systems can't do that now, either, not without a lot of ancillary programming, not even those which claim to be relational databases.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C are pushing the Semantic Web and "Internet 2.0" because, without it, XML makes no sense. Whether it can rescue XML from being just another flash-in-the-pan is anyone's guess. No doubt some form of XML will always survive, as has FORTRAN.
But 2.0 surely won't address the fundamental concerns Mr Nelson which make us feel so anxious, or should.
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