
“The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to information” (1991) - phodo
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY/bJGhZyooXzkJ
======
gumby
Gah, 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
I 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.

------
userbinator
How 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/bJG...](http://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY/bJGhZyooXzkJ)

~~~
asimuvPR
Well, 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
I 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
> 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
_not 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.

------
justinlardinois
> 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
He 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.

------
paulannesley
This 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.

~~~
asdfaoeu
Though it doesn't look like it's valid HTML
[https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Finfo.cern.ch...](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)

~~~
Touche
Neither is google.com:
[https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co...](https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F)

------
c3534l
My favorite quote:

> Everybody, already, is a part of history. Writing here is just like spray
> painting "I was here" in Machu Picchu.

~~~
laser
Haha that was good, but I preferred "The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to
allow links to be made to any information anywhere." ;)

------
alfor
I 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.

------
PrimHelios
>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
> 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).

------
hexane360
> 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.

------
mathiasrw
> 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.

