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it left people thinking of the Web as a medium in which a few published and most browsed. My vision was a system in which sharing what you knew or thought should be as easy as learning what someone else knew.

Mundane as it was, this first presentation of the Web was, in a curious way, a killer application. Many people had workstations, with one window permanently logged on to the mainframe just to be able look up phone numbers. We showed our new system around CERN and people accepted it, though most of them didn't understand why a simple ad hoc program for getting phone numbers wouldn't have done just as well.

Of course, we didn't want our brainchild with all its tremendous potential to be locked in at this rather pedestrian level. To broaden the Web's horizons, I set about giving talks and conducting demonstrations. So that people could see something "out there on the Web" other than the phone book, and to practice what we preached, Robert and I continued to document the project in hypertext on info.cern.ch.

What we had accomplished so far was based on a few key principles learned through hard experience. The idea of universality was key: The basic revelation was that one information space could include them all, giving huge power and consistency. Many of the technical decisions arose from that. The need to encode the name or address of every information object in one URI string was apparent. The need to make all documents in some way "equal" was also essential. The system should not constrain the user; a person should be able to link with equal ease to any document wherever it happened to be stored.

This was a greater revelation than it seemed, because hypertext systems had been limited works. They existed as databases on a floppy disk or a CD-ROM, with internal links between their files. For the Web, the external link is what would allow it to actually become "worldwide." The important design element would be to ensure that when two groups had started to use the

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