> 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.
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.
> 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
The original implementation did support publishing content. The problem is that the Web was prototyped on a NeXTCube, and nobody could run it because nobody else had NeXT machines. Most people's exposure to the Web was through the linemode browser or Mosaic, and neither one implemented the full range of functionality that WorldWideWeb.app did (including content authoring). Andreessen reportedly did want a way to do annotations in the browser but it didn't happen precisely because the only way he could think to do it was by coordinating everything with a centralized service.
As for linking specifically, early versions of HTTP had a LINK method, but it was underspecified and eventually removed in later revisions of the standard. If you operate the server, though, you can make it support whatever methods you want, so there's no reason people couldn't take matters into their own hands and bring it back so long as they're able to figure out how it should actually work.
I remember preferring gopher to the web. There was a gopher link to connect to the pure text web. Once I got my hands on a static ip and the mosaic browser that integrated images in text in a single page the web made sense.
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.
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.
I would say that the web become popular way before significant malicious actors adapted to the web arrived. The web stated as an open system available to be used for practical use cases, and grown exponentially from there.
Expiration dates work for things like that. No need to store social media posts for longer than a few days. Transient data doesn’t need to be permanently pinned. It’s not a pure archive. Certain sites can be archived.
Hmm very interesting response by @somat about malicious actors, and I like your point about the disappointment of web3 here.
One reason I'm not super surprised they didn't implement publishing is that it seems like there's an inherent complexity to information passing in two-way systems. See as an example the difficulty in a grid with distributed renewables or how long websockets took to come along. Consider even an economy: you bring simply money to the store, not goods that you've created to barter, because of the complexity in figuring out the value of the offered goods, the cost of the negotiation, and potential mismatches in needs.
Maybe, just like with the electrical grid, we can start to get more creative now that the costs of 'the usual way' are more well-known and can start being internalized instead of externalized - this is the case with air pollution and carbon for our electrical grid, for instance, which is helping to drive distributed generation.
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.
I would argue that we -did- get this, and where it was implemented it is almost universally terrible.
For example the comments section on any blog or video. Most of it is bland, chunks of it are spam.
Example 2 are the services that explicitly all people to write content. Facebook, Twitter etc. It's a giant mess of mostly-terrible content. In some cases created with the explicit intention to cause harm.
Wikipedia is the opposite, mostly good, but largely because an enormous community spends countless hours undoing the work of bad actors, and effectively censoring most bad behaviour.
That the Web does not live up to some ideal is not the fault of Netscape or Mosaic. It's not the fault of Facebook. It's the fault of the people using the Web. It turns out there are plenty of us, willing to spew out mindless opinions (including this one) all night long.
Prior to the endless September it was possible to "educate" folk to the etiquette of the internet. But that education had a really narrow target market, and didn't scale. Once Joe Public arrived there was no way to "educate", nor was it desirable to do so.
People are people. Don't blame the Web. Blame the people using it.
(And, anecdotally, if early users had had the opportunity to edit my Web pages, that "feature" would have been turned off almost instantly.)
I agree. The notion that “They” (big bad publishers/media etc) are afraid of user-generated competition and that’s why we have asymmetric connections and a Web that works mainly for consumption, is misguided. We have those things because most people only have the quality of content to produce that you see witnessed in YouTube comments, or, would use any amplified platform to spam relentlessly their political opinions or some moneymaking scheme. There exist places like Wikipedia that do seem to embody those values of symmetry and democracy, but they require big compromises and a lot of formal processes of enforcement of community norms, in all a ton of work for people, in order to stay good.
> 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.
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:
Are you thinking of Google SideWiki? It let people add comments and annotations to any web page.
It was scrapped, one reason was that webmasters hated it. They viewed it as a sort of embarrassing graffiti scrawl and source of spam they had to "manage" for brand reasons, but couldn't. For example journos didn't like people being able to annotate their articles to disagree with them.
wordpress running as much of the web as it does makes me feel the stage was a resounding success. sure some parts have regressed but the internet is still young and we can fix it.
You could imagine an alternate history where user feedback had been built into the infrastructure of the web, where being able to write a comment, similar to bulletin board systems, or suggest a change, would have been built into browsers and http servers. Where admins would have to take active steps in the server configuration to turn off that feature.
Implementing it naively would mean that spam would have been an early initial problem. You would handle it with moderation initially, where some sort of verification would be used. IP black lists would have been a heavy handed early solution. I like to think that if the social aspect of the web was in the hands of infrastructure engineers, that we would have seen clever solutions, like proof of work needed to post content. That may have triggered the rise in ideas like cryptocurrency in the late ‘90s.
The rise of comment spam would have taken pressure off of email providers to manage spam. The focus on them would have been lower. You wouldn’t have seen legislation like the CanSPAM act, which legitimized unsolicited commercial email content.
By integrating social aspects into the web early on, it would have degraded the value proposition of social media sites. You likely would have seen sites like MySpace and Facebook get started, but they would have leveraged built in web technologies to implement the social aspects. A user feed with comments could just have been implemented with RSS and the built in comment feature. Link aggregation sites like Digg or Reddit never would have been created. The value proposition would have exclusively been finding and connecting with friends.
With cryptocurrency taking off in the early 2000s, we may have seen payments get integrated into the web browser at this stage since there already would have been infrastructure for proof of work built into the web browser. This would give content publishers a way to make money off their content besides advertising.
Today there are 1/5 as many journalists as there were 20 years ago. The news industry has been decimated by the web. Had payments been integrated early on, the news industry would not have had to resort to advertising to as high degree as it had, local news would have found more robust funding sources in the digital era, and we would have a more robust media environment today.
With two way communication being the norm, and social media having less prominence, there would have been more healthy discourse on issues. Rise in disinformation campaigns would have been blunted by people with expertise seeing content and being able to say, “that’s bs because … “. That content would not have been in walled gardens, kept away from most of the public to see. We would not have seen a rise in disinformation campaigns. The vaccine movement would have not taken off. This would have changed the course of elections. I don’t think we would be able to predict political outcomes in 2008 and beyond in this future.
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".
> 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.