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                                    March 20, 2002

The impressive thing about Tim Berners-Lee is
not how much he did, but how little... and yet
the things he did were clearly (in retrospect)
the right things to do.

Ted Nelson had conceived of a global
"Grand Hypertext", but he hadn't
gotten far because he was trying to
do too much, too soon.

Berners-Lee put together some
existing pieces in a way that
all just clicked, just well                "Worse is better"
enough to get things moving.
                                                               (Heh heh heh
                                                                "just clicked"
My impression *had* been                                        Heh.)
that he looked at things
like ftp and compiled       You might say http is an
help systems (closed        "easier to use" and/or
hypertext) and brought      "prettified" version of
the two together.           ftp.  But that greatly
                            understates the case.     JOY_OF_FTP


But reading "Weaving the Web",
I'm a little more impressed with
what he pulled off.
For one thing CERN evidently
wasn't really wired for TCP/IP
yet, even as late as the late
80s: that was one of the things
he had to talk them into.

And he actually went to vendors
of commercial hypertext software,
and tried to talk them into adding
internet support, but they rejected
the idea...

And he doesn't mention ftp or gopher.
Could it be he hadn't really used them
much?  Usenet is mentioned... the web
considered as memory for usenet.               True, in a way...
                                               It could be that usenet
                                               was instrumental in getting
                                               the web established.

To justify what he was                             In the days before search
doing at CERN, he had to                           engines and blogs, that's
come up with the simplest                          how people traded URLs.
possible steps he could
take that would still be
useful: A line oriented,
text only browser (without       The point has been made
his beloved editing              that we still don't have
features), and the CERN          good editing features...
internal phone listings          but I dunno how true
placed on an early, crude        that is.  Netscape
web-server.                      Composer exists, it is
                                 (or was) prevalent.  MS
You might say that was the       has their "save as html"
first real step... he            features.  These work
calls it a "killer app".         well enough to lower the      But it appears
                                 barrier to authorship         that that wasn't
  (The database-backed           for anyone who cares (or      low enough.
  website is not a later         so you would think).          Now (2004) the
  idea, it was the                                             "weblog" has
  *first* idea!)                                               finally
                                                               democratized
                                                               web publication.




All the things wrong with the web:

  No distinction between
  document ID and location ID.

  No decentralized *storage* (nntp!).

  No equation support                       Lack of equations always seemed
                                            bizarre, to me...  wasn't the web
Were perhaps also what was right            invented for physicists?  but
with it.  Simple enough to be               "Weaving" provides some insight:
completed, providing just enough            the stuff Berners-Lee was doing at
to put it across...                         Sterne wasn't oriented toward
                                            theoretical physics



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