The Web: A Runaway Experiment

The web as we know it is a runaway experiment. Originally, it was supposed to be read-write; yet due to Steve Jobs’ failure to dominate the world it ran away from the CERN lab as a read-only abomination we know today. Ever since, we had to grapple with Frontpages, DreamWeavers of the world and similar crap. Not to mention the latest horror called wiki.

Tim Berners-Lee originally designed a read-write hypertext system. The WorldWideWeb software, as he named it, ran on NeXT OS and had facilities for creating, linking, and consuming hypertext resources. In his personal history, he wrote:

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact hat a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.

NeXT was ahead of its time and allowed easy creation of a software with full hypermedia authoring capabilities. Unfortunately, Steve Jobs was failing to dominate the world with NeXT. As Berners-Lee put it:

We needed Web clients for other platforms (as the NeXT was not ubiquitous) and browsers Erwise, Viola, Cello and Mosaic eventually came on the scene.

To stimulate the acceptance of the project outside CERN, Berners-Lee released the code for a simplified client (Browser) to the Internet community in August 1991. This directed development efforts towards the consumption part, the browser.

From that moment on it was all downwards: First, Mosaic took the lead, then Netscape came on the scene in ‘94 and quickly became the dominant player with 80% of market by ‘96. Microsoft, as part of its embrace and extend strategy copied everything Navigator did, completely took over the web with Internet Explorer by ‘99 and that’s why we have what we have today. After eradicating Netscape, Microsoft disbanded its Internet Explorer team by the beginning of the 21st century. Firefox came on stage recently, and while it is admirably cool piece of software, it is still solving the wrong problem: pixel perfect standards of display and fast rendering of pages is not what we really need. We need two-way, writable web.

So, you see, it was Steve Jobs who broke the Internet. Al Gore must be seriously pissed.