This was written as a preface to a possible book in aroun 1993/4. Written in Microsoft word, copied to HTML and salvaged by hand. History mainly...Tim BL
There is something about information popping up onto a screen from anywhere, just anywhere in the world which is difficult to put across on paper. It would probably take about 20 minutes of clicking on underlined phrases, occasionally typing in search words, for the ideas and the possibilities to get across.
I'd explain how that document was from Switzerland, and the next one happened to be in Australia, and you'd see that it didn't matter, and they appeared in a twinkling in either case. You'd get the feeling of a great mass of information which is suddenly available to you. Maybe we'd find something, a mediaeval painting, a collection of flowers, or the Universal Commercial Code in hypertext, which would be particularly exciting. When we moved on to adding our own thoughts to the web, annotating things we found with links to others, you would perhaps feel suddenly what it could do to your company or your school if everyone you knew was there in the web with you, exploring, communicating, building our common knowledge.
We can't sit together in front of a computer, but you have this book, and I'll do what I can.
Take your pen, mouse, or favorite pointing device, and press here. Go on -- press.
Well, clearly nothing happened. You must be reading the paper version of this book. If you had been reading the electronic version (which is in fact on the diskette in the back cover) then you would have jumped to somewhere else. That is, the page would have dissolved on the screen to be replaced by something else from somewhere in the universe which the author felt was appropriate. There are three fascinating things about this.
One fascinating thing is that, if your computer were connected to a network, the network, the Internet, you would be able to follow links just like that into one of millions of documents all over the planet.
Another fascinating thing is that you didn't need to know anything about computers or networks or unix or MSDOS.
The third is that this is really true now, it's changing the world, and you ought to know about it. Which is probably why you bought this book.
This book explains how to explore and even contribute to the World-Wide Web of information. As getting started is hardly complicated enough to merit a book, it also has some bits on how the Web works, and how it related to other things and people and, to set the record straight once and for all, what it is. It explains how, in the Web, you can find all the Internet things you have heard of, like FTP archives and news, as well as hypertext and multimedia. It explains how you don't have to worry about what sort of things they are, or where they are, but tells you how to find out if you want to know. There's a little about how it started, but hardly anything about where it's going to end.
The World-Wide Web is a name for all the information you can access, read, listen to, and add to, using your computer and the network. It's called WWW because its a neat acronym, because it is global, and because it is connected together by lots of links. I couldn't think of anything better at the time, and to be truthful I still can't.
The World-Wide Web is an initiative, a project, and a way of looking at the world. As an initiative it encourages everyone who can to share knowledge using computer networks. As a project it designs, standardises, and writes programs to make this easy and intuitive so that everyone can benefit. It looks at man's knowledge as a world in which one can wander at will, find areas of interest, learn, contribute, or just find out tomorrow's weather.
Part one of this book describes the Web from more than one point of view. If you already understand about computers, or about networks, or about information retrieval (...) you can skip sections which are already evident. In this chapter we'll see what the web looks like in practice, and what the essential elements are which make it possible, and make it different from anything which has happened before.
Part two is about the web and people. It discusses what the web can do if used well, and why the people who developed it are so excited about it. Here I list some of the questions of openness in society, privacy, fears, copyright and payment for information which the web, by its existence, brings up for us to consider.
Part three is a practical. It shows you how to actually use the web, how to find things, and how to put your own information into the web. It compares the various client programs, with screen dumps of real examples.
Part four is more technical. It describes how the web works, including the protocols of communication between the computers and the formats of some of the date they exchange. You don't need information in this chapter to use the web. You do if you want to write programs for it, or if you are just curious.
Much of the material in this book has been prepared from hypertext which has been "on the web" and has therefore benefited from the criticism of all sorts of bright people in all sorts of places. In a way this presentation of the web is a tribute to all those who have contributed to it. They are too many to list individually but (...)