6 ms·
Tim Berners-Lee's original WWW proposal (1989)
- rollypolly 15y ago"Vague, but exciting.." how prescient.
- timClicks 15y agoIt's so interesting to see that the ideas of the Semantic Web came first, even though those aspects have been hardest to find adoption.
- yuhong 15y agoI think that was the result of Mosaic and later Netscape, as well as David Siegel.
- prodigal_erik 14y agoI see it as a variation on http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html. What TimBL had in mind would have been a monumentally more powerful trove of information, but our society doesn't want one of those very badly, so it rewarded the people who were taking shortcuts and making shiny toys rather than contributing to that. (And I'm about as guilty as anyone else of doing what pays.)
- ktizo 15y agoI have this diagram on a cern tshirt that I unexpectedly found in a charity shop. It is probably my geekiest wearable item, other than maybe my magnifying soldering glasses.
- yaix 15y ago>> Many of the discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question - Yes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project? That is interesting. The LHC basically triggered the WWW. Good argument for your next discussion with the annoying "what is all this expensive research even good for" type of people. The LHC gave you Facebook and YP, dude!
- calydon 14y agoSo if the web was originally intended to be a document/project management system, what would you end up with if you tried to invent an (improved) global system of interconnected computer networks?
- pavlov 14y agoSomething that never gets built because the project scope is too ambitious and ambiguous... The World Wide Web was preceded by Project Xanadu [1] which, despite a decade of significant investments from both research institutions and private companies like Autodesk, never reached a stable state where it could be actually used for something by people outside the project's inner circle. The WWW got there just a few years after it started. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
- yaix 14y agoThanks, exactly what I wanted to say. Tech people often forget that for many global scale projects, the actual /technical/ problems to solve are only about 5% of the overall project. The political problems (political meaning conflicting interests of different parties involved) are much harder to solve. Having studied both, I love tech because 1+1=2 always. I find politics much harder because --depending on the way you present a problem-- 1+1 maybe anything between 1 and 3, and sometimes even 20.
- orblivion 14y agoThat's kindof like asking, "If it weren't for this expensive building project, nobody would have ever invented this new type of hammer". If $X buys you an LHC and the WWW, you could spend less than $X to buy the WWW. I think experimental physics has plenty of its own utility, though it probably won't become relevant to engineering for decades. My overall point is that you should account for the value of different components properly.
- Create 14y ago
- seldo 15y ago"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities." In other words: standards are more important than features. The utility of the web comes from being open and interoperable.
- brlewis 14y agoI saw the web in 1991. It didn't look ready to become adopted as a standard. The fancy graphics of NCSA Mosaic helped propel it forward. The img element was created without a standards process.
- js2 14y ago"proposed new tag: IMG": http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.html http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...
- rquantz 14y agoIs this meant to be a rebuttal? Or are you supporting the parent? The result of this discussion was no agreement, if I'm not mistaken, leading to mosaic implementing the img tag without a standard.
- ShabbyDoo 14y agoIt amuses me how the initial proposals for what turn out to be great ideas often are so relatively narrow and small. The anecdote about the Xerox photocopier's R&D being justified by adding up the number of secretaries and the number of documents replicated via mimeograph comes to mind. [Sorry, couldn't find link] What we don't ever see are the absurdly optimistic justifications for really bad ideas. Cuecat? Iridium satellites? The supposed future ubiquity if the Segway? We only know about the flops which because big enough (or were hyped enough) to have gotten publicity. Have you ever seen the abysmal nature of business plans in a local business plan competition? I almost included Webvan, but I'm not sure that it was an inherently bad idea -- just one which required high adoption levels to achieve positive cash flow. And, I didn't include things like pets.com which I suspect (without justification) were known by their inventors as bad-but-flip-able ideas.