On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal to CERN for an information management system, which subsequently developed into the World Wide Web.
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On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal to CERN for an information management system, which subsequently developed into the World Wide Web.
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Berners-Lee’s proposal essential combined the existing feature of the finger command and the .profile and .plan files with a primitive hypertext. His specification was logically inconsistent, as he’d confused the concept of a line-break with that of beginning a new paragraph.
Very clever people found interesting ways of using Berners-Lee’s idea. Journalists and others mistook the cleverness of those people for cleverness on the part of Berners-Lee.
Since the original proposal, HTML has developed into a coherent and more complex specification. But it has been captured for an artificial class of experts, in that the complexity has been compounded by committees to a point at which anyone attempting to learn HTML from scratch is most likely to be overwhelmed. (Those of us who learned when the specification was much simpler are at a very great advantage.)
Berners-Lee’s proposal essentially combined the existing feature of the finger command and the .profile and .plan files with a primitive hypertext. His specification was logically inconsistent, as he’d confused the concept of a line-break with that of beginning a new paragraph.
Very clever people found interesting ways of using Berners-Lee’s idea. Journalists and others mistook the cleverness of those people for cleverness on the part of Berners-Lee.
Since the original proposal, HTML has developed into a coherent and more complex specification. But it has been captured for an artificial class of experts, in that the complexity has been compounded by committees to a point at which anyone attempting to learn HTML from scratch is most likely to be overwhelmed. (Those of us who learned when the specification was much simpler are at a very great advantage.)