> 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, an

> 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 .. I have red book "How the Web was Born" by James Gillies, R. Cailliau, and the reason why the original vision didn't fly is bit more complicated. 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... The thing is that the editing/publishing part was in fact part of the fist prototype from the beginning (without any way to edit remote resources though)! But to make the system usable early for as many users as possible, this feature was not included in the dumb terminal or vt100 browser, or any other browsers which followed it. Btw some time ago here on hn, I run into a person who was among the early users of the dumb terminal browser (aka line mode browser), but he didn't know much about the 1st prototype and it's editing feature. And I would say that it would be very difficult to figure out how to make the original vision or browser/editor fly while at the same time trying to make the early web useful to early users and on top of that driving adoption as fast as possible. The CERN invested money into this proposal expecting some outcome, not a 10 years of vaporware (like some other hypermedia systems ended up, ehm). Moreover if Tim and Robert weren't able to focus on demonstrating that their proposal is practical (remember that while you find their vision familiar and understandable, it was not the case back then), it could have easily failed early on, and we could have ended up with a proprietary closed system(s) from the start. Btw I wrote a blog post about this very topic some time ago, if you are interested in more details or would like to see additional references from this period, you can have a look: https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser/ https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser...