When talking to Ted Nelson, strap in tight. It's quite a ride. Trained as a philosopher and film director, he is equal parts visionary and crank. Many consider him to be one of the fathers of the World Wide Web. He coined the word "hypertext" in 1965, but he has become a scathing critic of the Web and the form it has assumed. "HTML is the dumbing down of hypertext," he complained last week during a chat. "It's a one-way tunnel, an amusement park slide."

In 1989, Nelson told the U.S. Congress that the hypertext revolution was coming. A few years earlier, he described a computing world made up of hundreds of thousands of file servers and hundreds of millions of simultaneous users.

And yet today, Nelson is toiling away as a professor of media at Keio University's Fujisawa campus; one recent article called it "an exile," a description he disputes -- but doesn't exactly refute. Rather, he claims to have "generally kept apart from the mainstream discussion."