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WWW
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 that he looked Heh.)
at things like ftp and compiled help
systems (closed hypertext) and brought
the two together.
You might say http is an
"easier to use" and/or
"prettified" version of
ftp. But that greatly JOY_OF_FTP
understates the case.
Reading "Weaving the Web", I'm
a little more impressed with
what he pulled off, though.
For one thing CERN evidentally
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 simpliest 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 very oriented toward
theoretical physics
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