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documents or graphics, they can share directly. If not, they can both translate to HTML.

The fundamental principle behind the Web was that once someone somewhere made available a document, database, graphic, sound, video, or screen at some stage in an interactive dialogue, it should be accessible (subject to authorization, of course) by anyone, with any type of computer, in any country. And it should be possible to make a reference—a link—to that thing, so that others could find it. This was a philosophical change from the approach of previous computer systems. People were used to going to find information, but they rarely made references to other computers, and when they did they typically had to quote a long and complex series of instructions to get it. Furthermore, for global hypertext, people had to move from thinking about instructions to thinking in terms of a simple identifier string—a URI—that contained all the essential details in a compact way.

Getting people to put data on the Web often was a question of getting them to change perspective, from thinking of the user's access to it not as interaction with, say, an online library system, but as navigation though a set of virtual pages in some abstract space. In this concept, users could bookmark any place and return to it, and could make links into any place from another document. This would give a feeling of persistence, of an ongoing existence, to each page. It would also allow people to use the mental machinery they naturally have for remembering places and routes. By being able to reference anything with equal ease, the Web could also represent associations between things that might seem unrelated but for some reason did actually share a relationship. This is something the brain can do easily, spontaneously. If a visitor came to my office at CERN, and I had a fresh cutting of lilac in the corner exuding its wonderful, pungent scent, his brain would register a strong association between the office and lilac. He might walk by a lilac bush a day later in a