7 ms·

A read through the original WorldWideWeb proposal

89 points by ahuth 3y ago

imiric 3y ago
One thing the article doesn't mention, and that's always intrigued me of the WWW proposal, is the phase 2 of the project, and specifically the first line: > The creation of new links and new material by readers. At this stage, authorship becomes universal. > The ability of readers to create links allows annotation by users of existing data, allows to add themselves and their documents to lists (mailing lists, indexes, etc). It should be possible for users to link public documents to (for example) bug reports, bug fixes, and other documents which the authors themselves might never have realised existed. This phase allows collaborative authorship. It provides a place to put any piece of information such that it can later be found. Making it easy to change the web is thus the key to avoiding obsolete information. One should be able to trace the source of information, to circumvent and then to repair flaws in the web. It envisioned some kind of a collaborative web where readers were also publishers, but it didn't go into much detail. AFAIK this phase was never completed, and IMO this is a major reason why the web is so centralized today, why users have no control of their data, and why it's primarily aimed towards consumers. Had publishing content been as easy as consuming it was from the start, there would've been more tooling built around this concept, and publishing content would've been as easy as consuming it is today. I.e. we would have had publishing equivalents of web browsers, instead of web servers that are only meant for the technically literate. New web users would be educated that the web is a collaborative tool, and not just for consumption, and they would've had tools that would allow them to share their data in a granular way. This would've avoided the need for early web hosting services like GeoCities to exist, ISPs would've had to provide symmetrical internet connections, and the modern web landscape would've been very different. This is something that TBL is trying to correct with his Solid project, but I think it's too little, too late, as that ship has long since sailed. The current way the web works is so ingrained in culture, and giant tech corporations now define its direction, as long as it benefits their bottom line. Easy web publishing is _still_ not native to the web, and users have to rely on 3rd parties. Opera had an interesting project in 2009 with Unite, which allowed publishing right from the browser, but it went nowhere for some reason. The modern decentralized web movement, a.k.a. "web3", is too focused on the technology instead of the user, and I don't see it gaining mainstream traction. In many ways I'm disappointed with how the web turned out. It's ruled by corporations, government agencies, and advertisers. It's hostile to the user on every turn, and it's literally impossible to navigate without software that blocks ads and trackers, which tech corporations are also actively fighting. The sad part is that I'm not sure what the solution might be, or if there is one at all. All signals seem to point to an even more encroaching and hostile experience in the future.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Definitely. I remember at the time hoping that Mosaic (and then Netscape) would extend out into the authoring space, but instead all we got was crap like Frontpage. The early web just became magazines / flyers online. And in that respect it was far behind some other modalities we had at the time (thinking of social MUDs/authoring-environments like LambdaMOO, etc. in particular which were far more synchronous and interactive). But that wasn't really the intent. It was supposed to be more about knowledge sharing and editing, with a collaborative component. But in all these things, it really shows the way that era of the Internet was still very much about academia and its methods and concerns.
  - WillAdams 3y ago
    Navipress was quite nice, and I wish AOL had done more with it than re-brand it as AOLpress and make use of the server technology. Apparently Tim Berners-Lee used Navipress for early drafts of his book, _Weaving the Web_ https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/ https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/
- somat 3y ago
  I think the problem with that proposal. also the problem with Ted Nelson's xanadu. and why the web was so successful are malicious actors, these can come in the form of antagonists and trolls but most often appear in the form of marketing. Most designs for information systems fail to account for malicious actors(the web is included in this category). and those that do, fail to get popular, mainly because secure systems are unpleasant to use. The web is resistant to this despite not being designed in a secure manner because all graph traverses are one way, the owner controls all outgoing links. I suspect any system where outgoing links are open territory would soon get overrun by spam.
  - austin-cheney 3y ago
    Maybe. The web became popular because third parties, Spyglass and Mosaic, evolved it into something visually appealing early. Competing internet applications didn’t have this except maybe email with its pseudo-standard form display of address fields and subject line. The goal and intention of the web was always sharing information via hyperlinks such that the collection of links naturally forms its own descriptive metadata. In this regard the web has largely failed with content being relegated to walled gardens. The very first step in this regard was Roy Fielding updating HTTP into a series of methods describing database operations, as opposed to merely transmission or content description, and nobody challenged it. In that regard the advancing malicious actors were early and close to home. If I were to learn from this and create a competing application I would ensure from the very beginning the technologies are single paradigm, extremely primitive, and fail if extended beyond their isolated area of concern so that malicious third parties are forced to advance transmission and content each in isolation from each other and from the underlying technologies. I would also ensure there is a single convention to describe both content and interaction because absolutely cannot figure out the front end.
karaterobot 3y ago
> “Market research and product planner. (50% RC?)” (Robert Cailliau?) > Software engineer: IBM mainframe. 50% RC (Robert Cailliau?) > Software engineer: Macintosh. 50% RC (Robert Cailliau?) Shout out to Robert Cailliau for giving 150% on the creation of the World Wide Web.
defanor 3y ago
> This is very different from where we’re at today, where there’s one format: HTML The part of the proposal it comments listed "pure ASCII", and surely we have plaintext files on the web as well. And all kinds of images, sound, video files, which are readily supported by common web browsers, out of the box. PDFs, too, which may contain hyperlinks that are active and handled by common web browsers. And even more if you count those handled by external programs (e.g., LibreOffice Writer must qualify as a "word processor", which is also mentioned in the commented part of the proposal, and then there are all sorts of other markup languages and formats, including those capable of hyperlinking further), web browser extensions, or don't restrict it to common web browsers.
marbu 3y ago
I just looked this up again in book "How the Web was Born" https://books.google.com/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.html?id=pIH-JijUNS0C https://books.google.com/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.ht... And even though there are multiple people requested, the CERN management approved just 2 full time people to work on the project (Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau), and on top of that assumed work of Nicola Pellow (a summer internship) and allowed Bernd Pollermann to spend some (limited) time to work on FIND gateway. So nobody actually worked as Hyper-Librarian or as X-windows and human interface engineer during early stages of the web at CERN. Which is why it would be hard to assign names to "RJ" or "KG".

89 points by ahuth 3y ago

One thing the article doesn't mention, and that's always intrigued me of the WWW proposal, is the phase 2 of the project, and specifically the first line: > The creation of new links and new material by readers. At this stage, authorship becomes universal. > The ability of readers to create links allows annotation by users of existing data, allows to add themselves and their documents to lists (mailing lists, indexes, etc). It should be possible for users to link public documents to (for example) bug reports, bug fixes, and other documents which the authors themselves might never have realised existed. This phase allows collaborative authorship. It provides a place to put any piece of information such that it can later be found. Making it easy to change the web is thus the key to avoiding obsolete information. One should be able to trace the source of information, to circumvent and then to repair flaws in the web. It envisioned some kind of a collaborative web where readers were also publishers, but it didn't go into much detail. AFAIK this phase was never completed, and IMO this is a major reason why the web is so centralized today, why users have no control of their data, and why it's primarily aimed towards consumers. Had publishing content been as easy as consuming it was from the start, there would've been more tooling built around this concept, and publishing content would've been as easy as consuming it is today. I.e. we would have had publishing equivalents of web browsers, instead of web servers that are only meant for the technically literate. New web users would be educated that the web is a collaborative tool, and not just for consumption, and they would've had tools that would allow them to share their data in a granular way. This would've avoided the need for early web hosting services like GeoCities to exist, ISPs would've had to provide symmetrical internet connections, and the modern web landscape would've been very different. This is something that TBL is trying to correct with his Solid project, but I think it's too little, too late, as that ship has long since sailed. The current way the web works is so ingrained in culture, and giant tech corporations now define its direction, as long as it benefits their bottom line. Easy web publishing is _still_ not native to the web, and users have to rely on 3rd parties. Opera had an interesting project in 2009 with Unite, which allowed publishing right from the browser, but it went nowhere for some reason. The modern decentralized web movement, a.k.a. "web3", is too focused on the technology instead of the user, and I don't see it gaining mainstream traction. In many ways I'm disappointed with how the web turned out. It's ruled by corporations, government agencies, and advertisers. It's hostile to the user on every turn, and it's literally impossible to navigate without software that blocks ads and trackers, which tech corporations are also actively fighting. The sad part is that I'm not sure what the solution might be, or if there is one at all. All signals seem to point to an even more encroaching and hostile experience in the future.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Definitely. I remember at the time hoping that Mosaic (and then Netscape) would extend out into the authoring space, but instead all we got was crap like Frontpage. The early web just became magazines / flyers online. And in that respect it was far behind some other modalities we had at the time (thinking of social MUDs/authoring-environments like LambdaMOO, etc. in particular which were far more synchronous and interactive). But that wasn't really the intent. It was supposed to be more about knowledge sharing and editing, with a collaborative component. But in all these things, it really shows the way that era of the Internet was still very much about academia and its methods and concerns.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  Navipress was quite nice, and I wish AOL had done more with it than re-brand it as AOLpress and make use of the server technology. Apparently Tim Berners-Lee used Navipress for early drafts of his book, _Weaving the Web_ https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/ https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/
somat 3y ago
I think the problem with that proposal. also the problem with Ted Nelson's xanadu. and why the web was so successful are malicious actors, these can come in the form of antagonists and trolls but most often appear in the form of marketing. Most designs for information systems fail to account for malicious actors(the web is included in this category). and those that do, fail to get popular, mainly because secure systems are unpleasant to use. The web is resistant to this despite not being designed in a secure manner because all graph traverses are one way, the owner controls all outgoing links. I suspect any system where outgoing links are open territory would soon get overrun by spam.
- austin-cheney 3y ago
  Maybe. The web became popular because third parties, Spyglass and Mosaic, evolved it into something visually appealing early. Competing internet applications didn’t have this except maybe email with its pseudo-standard form display of address fields and subject line. The goal and intention of the web was always sharing information via hyperlinks such that the collection of links naturally forms its own descriptive metadata. In this regard the web has largely failed with content being relegated to walled gardens. The very first step in this regard was Roy Fielding updating HTTP into a series of methods describing database operations, as opposed to merely transmission or content description, and nobody challenged it. In that regard the advancing malicious actors were early and close to home. If I were to learn from this and create a competing application I would ensure from the very beginning the technologies are single paradigm, extremely primitive, and fail if extended beyond their isolated area of concern so that malicious third parties are forced to advance transmission and content each in isolation from each other and from the underlying technologies. I would also ensure there is a single convention to describe both content and interaction because absolutely cannot figure out the front end.

karaterobot 3y ago

> “Market research and product planner. (50% RC?)” (Robert Cailliau?) > Software engineer: IBM mainframe. 50% RC (Robert Cailliau?) > Software engineer: Macintosh. 50% RC (Robert Cailliau?) Shout out to Robert Cailliau for giving 150% on the creation of the World Wide Web.

defanor 3y ago

> This is very different from where we’re at today, where there’s one format: HTML The part of the proposal it comments listed "pure ASCII", and surely we have plaintext files on the web as well. And all kinds of images, sound, video files, which are readily supported by common web browsers, out of the box. PDFs, too, which may contain hyperlinks that are active and handled by common web browsers. And even more if you count those handled by external programs (e.g., LibreOffice Writer must qualify as a "word processor", which is also mentioned in the commented part of the proposal, and then there are all sorts of other markup languages and formats, including those capable of hyperlinking further), web browser extensions, or don't restrict it to common web browsers.

marbu 3y ago

I just looked this up again in book "How the Web was Born" https://books.google.com/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.html?id=pIH-JijUNS0C https://books.google.com/books/about/How_the_Web_was_Born.ht... And even though there are multiple people requested, the CERN management approved just 2 full time people to work on the project (Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau), and on top of that assumed work of Nicola Pellow (a summer internship) and allowed Bernd Pollermann to spend some (limited) time to work on FIND gateway. So nobody actually worked as Hyper-Librarian or as X-windows and human interface engineer during early stages of the web at CERN. Which is why it would be hard to assign names to "RJ" or "KG".