Yes, CGI is a good call out, from architectural style perspective it is equivalent to RPC. And yes URL/URI became substantially Roy's work, an idealized digita

Yes, CGI is a good call out, from architectural style perspective it is equivalent to RPC. And yes URL/URI became substantially Roy's work, an idealized digital reference syntax, as was also the fact that what you got at a particular address- if you were to get anything- was data- maybe structured as a media type. There was no commitment to behavior or semantics. Just data. What I never got a complete sense of, from reading the docs and mailing list convos at the time, is how much Roy came to HTTP with the data-driven perspective, vs how much he absorbed from what were initially TBL decisions- organized around sharing documents and data- and from the presence of Gopher and FTP- dominant protocols at the time and both entirely data driven. And of course going back further- Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush and others- their relevant work was almost entirely in the data driven vein.