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“The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to information” (1991)
- c3534l 10y agoMy favorite quote: > Everybody, already, is a part of history. Writing here is just like spray painting "I was here" in Machu Picchu.
- laser 10y agoHaha that was good, but I preferred "The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere." ;)
- userbinator 10y agoHow ironic that, 25 years later, accessing this particular "link to information" requires running a Turing-complete language interpreter in a vastly complex piece of software consuming many orders of magnitude more resources than an entire personal computer would have at the time it was originally created. Yet the content remains the same plain text. These alternative links should work for those using more... period-appropriate browsers: http://groups.google.com/d/topic/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY http://groups.google.com/d/topic/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY http://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY/bJGhZyooXzkJ http://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY/bJG...
- asimuvPR 10y agoWell, television started as a simple signal. Its now way different. And that's ok. Requirements change over time as people realize how useful something may be.
- nothis 10y agoI wanted to reply something snarky about how the web has become exceptionally bloated even compared to other technologies but then I pictured an earliest-era TV broadcaste being shown in a modern TV show in 1080p and it's comparably incomparable. Still, a less snarky reply would be that the benefit of a 1080p image is obvious while the benefit of half a megabyte of javascript (a guess) to display some simple text is dubious at best, even if it could be used to do something otherwise unthinkable. I feel like over the course of 20 years, accessing a website has always felt equally slow/fast. That's kinda weird, since it's not all high-res images and whatnot. Somehow even the text loads slow, even the static, non-cool text. The issue is probably that these things are designed for attention span (which is low but non-zero) so whatever half a second we have available to draw stuff on the screen before people click away, we feel the need to fill with useless junk for the sake of it. I wonder what would happen if a few bigger websites would decide to design their frontpage in a way it loads in an instant on (nearly) every user's browser out there. So people get some contrast against sites that don't. Like, making no-split-second-lag a "feature". I wonder if it could catch on.
- sotojuan 10y ago> I feel like over the course of 20 years, accessing a website has always felt equally slow/fast. That's kinda weird, since it's not all high-res images and whatnot You could say this about any kind of modern software. Our laptops, OSs, etc are all way "better" but aren't instant in loading stuff yet. > I wonder what would happen if a few bigger websites would decide to design their frontpage in a way it loads in an instant on (nearly) every user's browser out there. So people get some contrast against sites that don't. Like, making no-split-second-lag a "feature". I wonder if it could catch on. Would be an interesting experiment for sure. Unless it's a progressively rendered, offline-first web app that looks the exact same as before, cynicism and working experience tells me most users would hate it (unless it's a site for programmers!). Plenty of consumers prefer and like the big fancy JS sites even if they take >1 sec to load in their LTE connections. That said, you can make a nice looking site with cool effects and a JS framework and have it work and load fast (we're doing this now at work!). It just takes discipline, knowledge, and team coordination that most programmers don't have because our industry doesn't expect them to (not enough consumers complaining it's slow).
- userbinator 10y agonot enough consumers complaining it's slow Alternatively, not enough consumers knowing that it could be faster. Most people have absolutely no idea about processor speeds or data sizes. When I pointed out to a friend that a 10MB "flashlight" app whose sole purpose is to display a solid colour on the Android's screen was ridiculously large, she did not understand at all. Even showing her some 4 kilobyte demoscene intros which did far more, didn't have much of an effect.
- tim333 10y agoI think websites, laptops etc. remaining approximately as slow is down to human nature rather than the tech. A delay of 1 or 2 seconds doesn't make much difference with something that'll take you a minute to read. That said in the early days like 1997 with dial up I remember pages taking 30 s to 1 min to load and finding something taking like 20 clicks pre Google. Now that was slow. I'd go get a cup of tea or read a book while waiting. I just timed two of my most frequent sites HN takes like 2s, the nyt like 4s. That doesn't really make a significant difference to the experience.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- paulannesley 10y agoThis link from that 1991 thread is still available 25 years later: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html I'd guess it hasn't been continuously available, but certainly must be one of the oldest web links working today.
- grahamel 10y agoYeah it's not always been there, Mark Boulton helped CERN restore it to it's original URL a few years ago, http://markboulton.co.uk/journal/firstwebsite http://markboulton.co.uk/journal/firstwebsite
- userbinator 10y agoIt's not often these days that you come across pages with such an exceedingly high content:markup ratio, and amazing how fast and readable they are compared to the typical pages of the "Modern Web".
- ams6110 10y agoMany older CS academics have personal web pages that are in that style.
- asdfaoeu 10y agoThough it doesn't look like it's valid HTML https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Finfo.cern.ch%2Fhypertext%2FWWW%2FTheProject.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.3+http%3A%2F%2Fvalidator.w3.org%2Fservices https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Finfo.cern.ch...
- hexane360 10y ago> At the other end of the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full text or keyword indexing. Make that massive information providers may provide millions of powerful, dynamic HTTP servers with massive information storage, computational power, and links to millions of other powerful, dynamic servers, traversed by millions daily.
- alfor 10y agoI is hard to believe how things have changed in the world 25 year later. I wonder I we will ever find something as transformative for our world as the www.
- justinlardinois 10y ago> We also have code for a hypertext server. You can use this to make files available (like anonymous FTP but faster because it only uses one connection). You can also hack it to take a hypertext address and generate a virtual hypertext document from any other data you have - database, live data etc. It's just a question of generating plain text or SGML (ugh! but standard) mark-up on the fly. The browsers then parse it on the fly. This was surprising to me. When people talk about the history of the web they make it seem like it was only intended for serving static documents, so reading Tim Berners-Lee talking about dynamic web pages in 1991 was unexpected.
- dredmorbius 10y agoHe also predicted search and social graph. Search discussed in the proposal. http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Proposal.html I thought social graph or something like it was as well. Hrm.
- mathiasrw 10y ago> The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data.
- PrimHelios 10y ago>Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and making at least one link into your web from another. Wouldn't that just make it part of the internet, though?
- gumby 10y ago> Wouldn't that just make it part of the internet, though? Indeed, that was the whole point! The web was intended to be an application that ran on the Internet. (Of course WE know it still is, but it seems most people think "the Internet" is something that you get to through the web browser while the rest is just apps).
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- gumby 10y agoGah, unidirectional links? And the links point to fragile named resources rather than a single, stable, centralized database? And if it ever did somehow manage to traction you'd never find anything -- it would require redundant databases with copies of EVERYTHING online. I mean, I know disk drives have gotten down to almost $1/MB, but the cost of that would rapidly become prohibitive. This whole idea is absurd and has no future. Let's leave this stuff to IBM and the phone companies who already have the necessary experience and are rolling out OSI for us. (all statements I remember from '91/92)
- arethuza 10y agoI can remember starting to look at the Web in late '92 and proposed it for a project in '93 (after Mosaic came out) and a lot of "hypertext" experts that I worked with pointed at all of the weaknesses of the Web and dismissed it as too primitive to be useful.