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weaving the web

understood. Nonetheless, at the time, the Web needed support and understanding from every community that could become involved, and in many ways the SGML community provided valuable input.

SGML was a diplomatic choice at CERN as well. SGML was being used on CERN's IBM machines with a particular set of tags that were enclosed in angle brackets, so HTML used the same tags wherever possible. I did clean up the language a certain amount, but it was still recognizable. I chose this direction so that when a CERN employee saw the angle brackets of HTML, he or she would feel, Yes, I can do that. In fact, HTML was even easier to use than CERN's version of SGML. The people promoting the SGML system at CERN could possibly be powerful figures in the choice of CERN's future directions and I wanted them to feel happy about the Web.

I never intended HTML source code (the stuff with the angle brackets) to be seen by users. A browser/editor would let a user simply view or edit the language of a page of hypertext, as if he were using a word processor. The idea of asking people to write the angle brackets by hand was to me, and I assumed to many, as unacceptable as asking one to prepare a Microsoft Word document by writing out its binary coded format. But the human readability of HTML was an unexpected boon. To my surprise, people quickly became familiar with the tags and started writing their own HTML documents directly.

As the technical pieces slowly fell into place, Robert and I were still faced with a number of political issues that gave us more than a twinge of anxiety. First of all, the Web was still not a formal project. At any moment some manager of the Computing and Networking division could have asked me to stop the work, as it wasn't part of any project, and it could have been considered inappropriate for CERN.

For eight months Robert, Nicola, and I refined the basic pieces of the Web and tried to promote what we were creating.