Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee
- Planted:
- Last watered:
I read Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. Published in 2000. It’s his first book and a good, natural precursor to This Is for Everyone.
Notes
The Web was a side project, not TBL’s main work at CERN (for a while, at least). He gave talks and demos to whoever would listen and wrote about it in a newsletter.
***
Domains preceded the web. TBL wrote the proposal in 1989 when domains had been around for four years. The first website pointed to info.cern.ch, but the domain already existed. DNS is important not only because domains are more memorable than IP addresses, but also because in most cases you’ll have to move a resource (e.g. a website) to another server with a different IP address, and it’ll still Just Work for users.
***
The invention of the ebook was one of many inspirations for the web (hyperlinked table of contents etc.). Ebooks are older than I’d have guessed. Unix pipes were another inspiration.
***
TBL wrote HTTP, URI, and HTML all in a couple months, it sounds like. The richness of HTML exceeded his expectations. He expected HTTP responses in other formats to provide rich experiences on the Web while HTML would be more like a translator there if needed.
***
TBL mentions the American build-it-in-the-garage entrepreneurial spirit pushing the Internet forward fast in contrast to a more cautious European approach.
***
The dream of the Web connecting the globe is itself what made the Web take off. TBL found excited early adopters around the world to contribute when he couldn’t find many locally.
***
The Web as a “solution to computer incompatibility” is an interesting way to think about it.
The vision I have for the Web is about anything being potentially connected with anything.
***
The demo TBL and Robert Cailliau gave at the Hypertext ‘91 conf in San Antonio was some serious hacker shit:
Robert and I flew to San Antonio with my NeXT computer and a modem. We couldn’t get direct Internet access in the hotel. In fact, the hypertext community was so separated from the Internet community that we couldn’t get any kind of connectivity at all. How could we demonstrate the Web if we couldn’t dial up info.cern.ch? Robert found a way. He persuaded the hotel manager to string a phone line into the hall alongside the main meeting room. That would allow us to hook up the modem. Now we needed Internet access. During our cab ride from the airport, Robert had asked the driver what the nearest university was and found out that it was the University of Texas in San Antonio. So Robert called the school and found some people who understood about the Internet and maybe the Web, and they agreed to let us use their dial-in service so we could call the computer back at CERN.
The next challenge was to get the Swiss modem we had brought to work with the American electrical system. We bought a power adapter that would take 110 volts (rather than the Swiss 220 volts). Of course it didn’t have the right little plug to connect to the modem. We had to take the modem apart, borrow a soldering gun from the hotel (Robert was rightly proud of this feat!), and wire it up directly. Robert got everything connected, and it worked. (50-51)
***
TBL really wanted browsers to be editors, too (read-write, not read-only). He tried to convince many early browser creators—including Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina working on Mosaic and later Netscape/Mozilla—to do it, but most said it was too hard.
***
Bike shedding and politicking at the IETF forced TBL to rename URIs to URLs (good story on page 62). At one point the URI working group met 12 times and still couldn’t agree on a 9-page document.
***
HP had “10% time” before Google and its “20% time” was a thing. One HP engineer used his 10% time on an early browser.
***
TBL visited Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina and others soon after they launched Mosaic, but there was tension because they were branding Mosaic in a way that avoided talking about or even took credit for the Web itself.
***
CERN wasn’t all that supportive of the Web for years, or maybe they just didn’t get it. To their credit, they signed off on letting Web protocols be open source with no strings attached in 1993, which might’ve otherwise stifled URI/HTTP/HTML/etc. before the Web really took off.
***
“Hyperlinks as endorsements” is an interesting framing (page 139). I’ve run into this problem with book emails where I want to reference a domain (e.g. sex.com) but do not want to link to it nor endorse its content.