HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT— ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.
It’s funny how Ted Nelson doesn’t like the way the internet, which he more or less envisioned, actually was implemented. He might be comforted by wikis, which do keep track of inward links and version management – little walled gardens of organization.
Tracking inward links never happened because it requires a centralized link registry – like the triples table in braindump or the links table that wiki systems must have – which never happened for the whole web because the whole point is to be decentralized. Of course there’s Google, which counts all the links with its massive infrastructure. As close as you’re gonna get, Ted.