📸 Photo

weaving the web

describe the behavior of monumental systems in the real world. For example, by understanding how two molecules of a gas interact when they collide, scientists using suitable mathematics can deduce how billions of billions of gas molecules—say, the earth's atmosphere—will change. This allows them to analyze global weather patterns, and thus predict the weather. If the rules governing hypertext links between servers and browsers stayed simple, then our web of few documents could grow to a global web.

The art was to define the few basic, common rules of "protocol" that would allow one computer to talk to another, in such a way that when all computers everywhere did it, the system would thrive, not break down. For the Web, those elements were, in decreasing order of importance, universal resource identifiers (URIs), the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There was no central computer "controlling" the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere that "ran" the Web. The Web was not a physical "thing" that existed in a certain "place." It was a "space" in which information could exist.

I told people that the Web was like a market economy. In a market economy, anybody can trade with anybody, and they don't have to go to a market square to do it. What they do need, however, are a few practices everyone has to agree to, such as the currency used for trade, and the rules of fair trading. The equivalent of rules for fair trading, on the Web, are the rules about what a URI means as an address, and the language the computers use—HTTP—whose rules define things like which one speaks first, and how they speak in turn. When two computers agree they can talk, they then have to find a common way to represent their data so they can share it. If they use the same software for