begin quoting Carl Lowenstein as of Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 09:07:28PM -0800: > On 11/2/06, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [snip] > >I'm not so sure that the original intent of the WWW was information; [snip] > > See < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web >
Unfortunately, the source makes the assertion suspect. It's like looking for an unbiased account of the Russian Revolution in the Our Hero Stalin Memorial Museum, or finding a balanced account of Joseph Smith by asking a Mormon. > - - - - - - > On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World > Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked > the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. > > "The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to > any information anywhere. [...] 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. Collaborators welcome!" ?from Tim > Berners-Lee's first message > - - - - - - Stated reasons are almost always something other than real reasons. I'd think it's more liked to be a case of NIH, or a liking of the abomination known as SGML, or a "that looks easy, I could do that, let's kick those americans in the teeth". Somewhere, I thought I read -- alas, I can't remember, so take with a huge grain of salt -- that TB-L (Or should that be T13e?) couldn't concentrate on one thing for very long, so existing systems that expected one to write relatively classical essays (intro, body, conclusions) were too difficult. Thus, the web, where data was fractured and dispersed, so everyone could have the same level of difficulty comprehending what was being said, and one couldn't easily tell if the data was written by a scatterbrain or by someone with some skill at writing prose. Or maybe I just found that gopher made sense and the web didn't, so the idea that the web was designed to provide information is laughable, as it never has done that well, compared to the things it displaced. (It's like looking at a world where the Yugo displaced the Mustang, and reading the promotional literature where "the Yugo is designed to be a muscle car, designed for acceleration and a sexy appearance".) [snip] > >and I'm *certain* it's ability to do so was not what made it so > >popular. (Interesting that _this_ point wasn't addressed. Heh.) -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-steer
