25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.
25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.
Posted Aug 25, 2016 15:08 UTC (Thu) by mattrose (guest, #19610)Parent article: 25 Years of Linux — so far
Posted Sep 1, 2016 5:06 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (6 responses)
In a similar place to where we are now?
Tim Berners Lee's only real invention with the Web was the hyperlink. That's not to decry his hard work - but he basically built on what was already there.
And instead of Linux we would have the BSDs. That world nearly happened ...
Really, it's the people that matter, not the inventions. Linus, with his excellent project management skills and readiness to accept contributions from anyone, and TBL with his open Scientific "giving" frame of mind.
Oh - and the lack, back then, of all these attempts to stifle creativity by patenting mathematics (software).
Cheers,
Posted Sep 5, 2016 21:33 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (5 responses)
But Tim actually got it working on a large scale. :)
Posted Sep 6, 2016 0:10 UTC (Tue)
by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
[Link] (4 responses)
I was studying and later working at a major hypermedia lab in the 1990s. Without a doubt some of the research work was on things that the World Wide Web still doesn't really do today. But unlike our research work, Tim's half-arsed "Web" had users out in the wild. A research project would scope out a small problem, solve some of it, and write up a paper. If you were lucky some of the code making it work lasted beyond the time taken to get published, and if you were _very_ lucky that code was actually available from an FTP site somewhere. But by the time I arrived even as an undergraduate, there were more pages on Tim's World Wide Web than in any of these research systems, and by the time I became a postgrad they were writing up the new research systems _on_ Tim's World Wide Web, and at that point it becomes obvious that you're basically just wanking. Even if Tim's system was much worse in a whole variety of ways than the prototype research projects (it was), Tim's system existed and the prototypes were just prototypes. By the time I ceased to be a postgraduate student Tim had an office in the building where I had studied and his name was highlighted above all the clever people who'd been designing "better" hypermedia systems while the World Wide Web was taking over the world.
Posted Sep 6, 2016 9:58 UTC (Tue)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (3 responses)
The World Wide Web is to distributed information retrieval systems essentially what MS-DOS (and its successors) are to operating systems. It works reasonably well for what it set out to do, it is very widespread, many people seem to like it, and by now, even though its shortcomings are well-known and there have been additions to the additions that were made to attempt to mitigate them, it is quite impossible to get rid of. It managed to get where it is now not because it was technically excellent or otherwise compelling but mostly because it was there at the right time when somebody (or somebodies) important was looking for something like it, and the other stuff that existed (remember Gopher?) for whatever reason wasn't interesting enough.
I remember attending a conference in the 1990s where a guy from a university in, I think, Austria gave a long talk which essentially amounted to whining that everyone was using this terrible WWW and nobody was interested in the much more clever and powerful system that his research group had invented. Didn't make a big impact, though.
Posted Sep 6, 2016 16:40 UTC (Tue)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link]
Bidirectional links with consistent metadata don't just happen.
But with HTTP I can just create a link to anyone's web page. Whether they like it or not. And they can rename that web page whether I like it or not.
Other, better systems require far too many coordinated moving parts which is why they fail.
Posted Sep 6, 2016 21:49 UTC (Tue)
by chfisher (subscriber, #106449)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Sep 7, 2016 8:48 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
Which would have been a bit silly given that one could write a basic Gopher server in half an afternoon and it would take perhaps three screens' worth of code.
I think one of the main advantages of the WWW over Gopher – at least with the advent of the likes of NCSA Mosaic – was that it made page-embedded hyperlinks and graphics a thing (although technically you could argue that these were features of HTML and it would have been perfectly possible to serve HTML over Gopher, which later versions of the Gopher protocol in fact allowed). Other drawbacks of Gopher included not having an equivalent to URLs, and only a very limited selection of allowable content types. In the end, Gopher was really too primitive to win.
25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.
Wol
25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners Lee's only real invention with the Web was the hyperlink.
Ted Nelson (the coiner of the term 'hypertext') was talking about unbreakable bidirectional hyperlinks (and not just point-to-point hyperlinks, but links to and from *regions*, with optional annotations and other attributes) decades before.
25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.
25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.
25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.
25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.
25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.