[HN Gopher] WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project (1990)
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WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project (1990)
Author : marban
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-11-12 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.w3.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.w3.org)
| dusted wrote:
| > 4 software engineers and a programmer
|
| Interesting, I wonder what the exact distinction was at the time,
| in that particular context..
|
| Since these days.. Well, my title is that of a sweng but I
| certainly spend a good amount of time programming.
| recuter wrote:
| 4 people to debate the merits of LED vs CFL, one to screw it in
| (probably an incandescent when research money starts running
| low). Same as today.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| One thing I've noticed more and more is that I've been trained to
| _not_ click links in a page but search for the same thing in
| google. Hyperlinks are now the navigation bar inside a website
| and little else. Checking the last 10 pages I have opened the
| majority of them from reputable sites either don't have links or
| don't have useful links.
|
| It's kind of bizarre that the main selling feature of HTML is
| basically lost today.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| IMO Google has been slowly condensing/removing the address bar
| in Chrome so people think Google Search == web, and I think
| your anecdote shows that it's working.
| julienreszka wrote:
| What?
| czx4f4bd wrote:
| I think you touch on a valid point about changes in the way
| content is presented online, but I also think you're really
| underselling just how utterly transformative the Web has been.
|
| Like, you say you don't click links because you use Google
| instead... but Google search returns links. It could not even
| function without links. Keyword search is even one of the
| listed goals in the proposal, because prior to the Web, there
| was no singular place to find and retrieve information like
| that:
|
| > At CERN, a variety of data is already available: reports,
| experiment data, personnel data, electronic mail address lists,
| computer documentation, experiment documentation, and many
| other sets of data are spinning around on computer discs
| continuously. It is however impossible to "jump" from one set
| to another in an automatic way [...] Usually, you will have to
| use a different lookup-method on a different computer with a
| different user interface. Once you have located information, it
| is hard to keep a link to it or to make a private note about it
| that you will later be able to find quickly.
|
| That's how utterly different the world was without the Web. You
| couldn't open ten pages from different sources in one
| application and then Google for something in a new tab. Every
| single way of accessing information would've been its own
| distinct application, without much overlap or interoperability
| between them. Any attempt to build a search engine like Google
| or a content aggregator like HN would've been stymied by the
| sheer variety of formats and standards for presenting
| information.
| pbreit wrote:
| Also the primary input to Google PageRank.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Page rank hasn't been used as the google algorithm for over
| 15 years now.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I keep reading this but can't quite parse it. What do you mean
| by "Hyperlinks are now the navigation bar inside a website and
| little else"? Do you mean "URLs are shown in browser navigation
| bars but people do not click hyperlinks in websites"?
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| Meaning that the main viable use case for them now is intra-
| site navigation, i.e. the menu bar at the top of the page.
| blowski wrote:
| So the observation here is that Tim Berners Lee's original
| vision was all these documents that would be linking to
| each other, across different hosts. But today's websites
| are mostly silos that only link inwards. Have I got that
| right?
| layer8 wrote:
| > I've been trained to _not_ click links in a page
|
| You don't click links on the Google results page?
| [deleted]
| russellbeattie wrote:
| (Self promotion, sorry, but relevant.)
|
| I believe that the time has finally come to fulfill TBL's "Phase
| 2" so I created a prototype a few weeks ago. It's just an HTML
| editor made to create HTML Documents. Not web sites, not landing
| pages, not designs, not mockups, not apps, not games, just HTML
| based rich text documents with links and media you can edit and
| save locally.
|
| https://www.hypertext.plus
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| _Looks at SGML renderers of the day_
|
| I used to work on a Mac C/68k SGML editor. It was used for data
| capture of European Patents. ResEdit UI - god help us.
|
| Combine those files with an example "Steven's" TCP server and a
| client that renders, you have Web 1.0.
|
| Technically, it was nothing novel - but it was given away for
| free.
|
| There were many hypertext systems at that time that were
| proprietary.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| What's this Hyper-Text stuff all about? Is this supposed to be
| about some weird decentralized version of Obsidian and other
| knowledge management apps? It all seems really hacky and clunky,
| because of this silly one-size-fits-all and decentralization
| stuff they keep harping about. Though the proposals at the end
| about providing an automated 'view' over existing databases are
| intriguing.
| [deleted]
| ipython wrote:
| Ah. A project that actually changed the world for the better.
| Breath of fresh air after all the coverage on FTX.
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(page generated 2022-11-12 23:00 UTC)