One major problem with Ted's design is that it wasn't simple enough to support multiple compatible implementations.
I'll repeat the James Clark quote from the wonderful DDJ interview that I posted to the other discussion about Ted Nelson:
There's a wonderful DDJ interview with James Clark called "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML" where he explains how a standard has failed if everyone just uses the reference implementation, because the point of a standard is to be crisp and simple enough that many different implementations can interoperate perfectly.
I'll repeat the James Clark quote from the wonderful DDJ interview that I posted to the other discussion about Ted Nelson:
There's a wonderful DDJ interview with James Clark called "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML" where he explains how a standard has failed if everyone just uses the reference implementation, because the point of a standard is to be crisp and simple enough that many different implementations can interoperate perfectly.
A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML: http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-o...
"The standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations." -James Clark