He argued for more innovation: "Give us the computer back and let people try various ideas that are much more high-minded than just having simple markup languages as the ways that represent things."

Van Dam said URLs have "dumbed [users] down to the point of almost no diminishing return." He argued for fine-grained bidirectional tag links and stressed a need for better tools for capabilities, such as visualization and debugging.

Social software offers potential, van Dam said. "The whole social software movement has been, I think, a great development but it is still a fraction of what it could be."