same old story, i suppose. was reminded of it by, reflecting on my general contempt for having to deal with css all the time, which led(googled) me toward http://www.w3.org/Style/LieBos2e/history/ .. and then, the general rememberance: "design is effen hard; "espcially the first draft" (as Herbert Simon "explained" circa 1969).
TL;DR (Courtesy of wikipedia)<p>Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents." Wired magazine called it the "longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry". The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an implementation was released, and this was incomplete.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu</a>
See also Ted Nelson's letter to the editor on
<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/rants.html</a>
and his list of errors he found in this text:
<a href="http://xanadu.com.au/ararat" rel="nofollow">http://xanadu.com.au/ararat</a>