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weaving the web

park and suddenly be reminded of my office. A single click: lilac ... office.

The research community had used links between paper documents for ages: Tables of contents, indexes, bibliographies, and reference sections are hypertext links. On the Web, however, research ideas in hypertext links can be followed up in seconds, rather than weeks of making phone calls and waiting for deliveries in the mail. And suddenly, scientists could escape from the sequential organization of each paper and bibliography, to pick and choose a path of references that served their own interest.

But the Web was to be much more than a tool for scientists. For an international hypertext system to be worthwhile, of course, many people would have to post information. The physicist would not find much on quarks, nor the art student on Van Gogh, if many people and organizations did not make their information available in the first place. Not only that, but much information— from phone numbers to current ideas and today's menu—is constantly changing, and is only as good as it is up-to-date. That meant that anyone (authorized) should be able to publish and correct information, and anyone (authorized) should be able to read it. There could be no central control. To publish information, it would be put on any server, a computer that shared its resources with other computers, and the person operating it defined who could contribute, modify, and access material on it. Information was read, written, or edited by a client, a computer program, such as a browser/editor, that asked for access to a server.

Several protocols already existed for transferring data over the Internet, notably NNTP for Network News and FTP for files. But these did not do the negotiating I needed, among other things. I therefore defined HTTP, a protocol simple enough to be able to get a Web page fast enough for hypertext browsing. The target was a fetch of about one-tenth of a second, so there was no time for a conversation. It had to be "Get this document," and "Here it is!"