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weaving the web

Letting go of that need for consistency was a crucial design step that would allow the Web to scale. But it simply wasn't the way things were done.

Despite the "Buy, don't build" credo, I came to the conclusion that I was going to have to create the Web on my own. In October 1990 I began writing code for the Web on my new computer. The NeXT interface was beautiful, smooth, and consistent. It had great flexibility, and other features that would not be seen on PCs till later, such as voice e-mail, and a built-in synthesizer. It also had software to create a hypertext program. Its failure to take over the industry, despite all these advantages, became for me a cautionary tale. NeXT required users to accept all these innovations at once—too much.

My first objective was to write the Web client—the program that would allow the creation, browsing, and editing of hypertext pages. It would look basically like a word processor, and the tools on the NeXT's system, called NeXTStep, were ideal for the task. I could create an application, menus, and windows easily, just dragging and dropping them into place with a mouse. The meat of it was creating the actual hypertext window. Here I had some coding to do, but I had a starting place, and soon had a fully functional word processor complete with multiple fonts, paragraph and character formatting, even a spellchecker! No delay of gratification here. Already I could see what the system would look like.

I still had to find a way to turn text into hypertext, though. This required being able to distinguish text that was a link from text that wasn't. I delved into the files that defined the internal workings of the text editor, and happily found a spare thirty-two-bit piece of memory, which the developers of NeXT had graciously left open for future use by tinkerers like me. I was able to use the spare space as a pointer from each span of text to the address for any hypertext link. With this, hypertext was easy. I was then able to rapidly write the code for the Hypertext Trans-