33 years ago today I submitted a proposal for a system called the World Wide Web

https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/1502594846044954630

by app4soft • 4 years ago

234 62 4 years ago

app4soft2• 4 years ago

Tim Berners-Lee tweeted today:

33 years ago today, I submitted a proposal for a system called the World Wide Web.[0]
I'd normally publish thoughts on the state of the web. But these are not normal times. Instead, Rosemary Leith & I ask you to join us to #StandWithUkraine however you can.
https://webfoundation.org/2022/03/standing-with-ukraine-a-me...

This tweet also quotes Rosemary Leith's yesterday's tweet:

To mark the web's birthday this year, Tim Berners-Lee and I have donated to causes supporting women, children & journalists in Ukraine.[1]
Join us, if you can, to contribute and #StandWithUkraine.
https://webfoundation.org/2022/03/standing-with-ukraine-a-me...

[0] https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/150259484604495463...

[1] https://twitter.com/rosemaryleith/status/1502224095001382913

skywal_l• 4 years ago

https://nitter.net/timberners_lee/status/1502594846044954630

neilv• 4 years ago

Since they link to a Ukrainian Red Cross site... does anyone whether that's the best organization to donate to for humanitarian aid to people in Ukraine?

And if it is, site looks like they use Stripe, but is it possible to donate directly from stripe.com, not using an odd Web site?

airstrike• 4 years ago

The Red Cross is generally regarded as the best humanitarian aid organization out there, maybe tied with a couple others like Doctors Without Borders

I was told a long time ago that one difference between the two is that the Red Cross will only go into territories where it is legally allowed to do so, whereas Doctors Without Borders will get into conflict zones even when not welcome and risk their lives in the process. My view is we're fortunate to have both.

0xy2• 4 years ago

No, they aren't. They raised $500m for Haiti and either embezzled it or incompetently wasted it. [1]

Their website contains claims that can only be described as fraud (claiming to help more people in an area than actually reside there, among other things).

There administration fees were well over 1/3rd in Haiti.

It's theft, basically.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-re...

app4soft2• 4 years ago

Since they link to a Ukrainian Red Cross site... does anyone whether that's the best organization to donate to for humanitarian aid to people in Ukraine?

Well, Ukrainian Red Cross & international Red Cross sometime acted controversial in Ukraine, but its only You who may decide how to help Ukrainians.

JFTR, I'm Ukrainiain living in Ukraine. Here is my statement for HN:[0]

Verified Ways to Help Ukraine: https://euromaidanpress.com/2022/02/27/verified-ways-to-help...

My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/app4soft

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395897

monkeybutton• 4 years ago

I wonder what its like to see the proliferation of Russian propaganda via a medium you created, it must be very disheartening. At least he gets to see it used for good like this too.

verisimi• 4 years ago

well, don't worry too much. He's using the day to attempt to redress the balance for Ukraine and LGBTQI+ people in Ukraine!

t_mann• 4 years ago

Putin seems to be rather shutting down web services in Russia. It's probably easier to control a narrative through TV (a medium that already existed 33 years ago) than through messy social media.

So just in terms of the current crisis, I'd say this invention is arguably doing more good than bad on average (allowing refugees to connect to relatives, coordinating help, enabling OSINT, various projects to inform Russian citizens, like the website with advice for how to talk to Russian relatives who are in denial,...).

Jerrrry• 4 years ago

Ukraine propaganda is not "good," Russian propaganda is not "bad"

Not a single condemnation of the Nazi affiliation yet, from anyone in the Western media.

They don't want to state plainly, that in this mega-reductionist viewpoint we all are conformed into, it is the Nazi's vs Russia.

I don't support Nazis. Guess I'm pro-Putin.

OnlyMortal• 4 years ago

Though HTML was a DTD of SGML served up via a TCP socket. The only revolution was giving the SGML client app away.

chasing• 4 years ago

Sometimes that's all it takes, man. Although I suspect there was a little more to it. Regardless, we're not celebrating the effort — many things take harder work to accomplish — we're celebrating the effect, which has been world-changing.

chrisseaton• 4 years ago

Simple as that, huh?

Everything sounds simple if you describe it in a facetiously simple way.

Michelangelo's David is just some bit of rock that someone's chipped away at.

justinator• 4 years ago

Even simpler is the fact that all Michelangelo did was take away the bits of marble that weren't David.

tonymet• 4 years ago

don’t forget the headers

tpmx2• 4 years ago

The only revolution was giving the SGML client app away.

No, the revolution was this combination of three relatively simple protocols (HTTP, URL, HTML) which together were incredibly powerful. The SGML crowd never came up with anything like that. They just kept on adding more complexities...

Reducing this to "giving away the client app" misses the point of the above so badly.

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

which together were incredibly powerful

Incredibly powerful, but not nearly enough for many applications. We have not comprehensively adopted Linked Data, REST and HATEOAS principles which would extend these protocols to be useful with more than simple hypertext. Many of the public JSON-serving endpoints that currently enable much of the "modern" Web could easily be extended to conformant JSON-LD, which would open up a bunch of interesting use cases.

em3rgent0rdr• 4 years ago

Indeed every great accomplishment can be reduced to a series of simple increments ontop of previous accomplishments. Brick-by-brick we all stand on solders of giants.

hirundo• 4 years ago

That is a floccinaucinihilipilification.

froh2• 4 years ago

Bless you!

That was my first thought. Then I learned this is a real word o-O

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/floccinaucinihilipilificati...

milliams• 4 years ago

...in the category of endofunctors?

froh2• 4 years ago

Mosaic was not the first browser (that was nexus, renamed thus when it's original name WorldWireWeb created some confusion)

Mosaic the company indeed. Tried to monetize in the server by giving away the browser.

However CERN also provided a free mit licensed Server, CERN httpd

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd#:~:text=CERN%20ht....

And it was not simply "served via TCP socket", it was served via a protocol that was similar to but simpler as another protocol, http vs ftp.

icedchai• 4 years ago

HTTP 0.9 was incredibly simple. There weren’t even any status codes or headers! There was not much “protocol” to speak of.

bombcar• 4 years ago

The story so far: 33 years ago the World Wide Web was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

djbusby• 4 years ago

It's an OK joke. But, wow, the Web is pretty awesome.

morpheos1372• 4 years ago

Mainly because it was commercialized. Of course that was always the plan. To get people really mad and harvest their emotions.

marricks2• 4 years ago

Wait till you hear about how the US government is already planning for the commercialization of space.

er4hn• 4 years ago

There is a theory which states that if enough people discover how to use the World Wide Web, it will disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states this has already happened.

stakkur• 4 years ago

There is yet a third theory which suggests that both of the first two theories were concocted by a wily web developer in order to increase the level of universal uncertainty and paranoia and so boost the use of the Web.

umeshunni• 4 years ago

I think you're describing web3

quickthrower22• 4 years ago

Compared to what? What if instead (to fill the void) there was a completely dominant internet app/document framework/standard by old-world Microsoft that uses a Word97 compatible binary format and an browser called “IE”, with the only alternative being a copycat open source version of that which is broken on Linux by changes in the IE. We would really want the WWW we have on this universe!

smilespray• 4 years ago

The comment is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

That's what The Microsoft Network was, actually. It was the default Internet service included in Windows 95, before Windows 98 got IE integration.

Zenst2• 4 years ago

Any form of human interaction has and will be used for good and bad things equally and there will always be anger. If you was to stop people doing something that some deem to make them angry, then there would be just as many, even more who would be angry that you stopped it.

Problem is - people communicate - they can get angry, compared with people who don't communicate - they get physical in their communication.

So the web, is good. After all, should we lambast whoever invented paper for the selection of bad printed material in human history. Nope.

amelius• 4 years ago

The internet also spreads misinformation. What happened at the Capitol can be blamed on the existence of the internet.

psyc• 4 years ago

My brain autocompleted to this the moment I read the title.

kcartlidge• 4 years ago

The story so far: 33 years ago the World Wide Web was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Upvote for the Douglas Adams-style writing.

parksy• 4 years ago

Happy birthday, the web.

We're still ironing out a few things and I hope we figure it all out some day.

m00dy• 4 years ago

Lightning only hits once.

robbedpeter• 4 years ago

Roy Sullivan would like a word with the manager...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan

dirtyid• 4 years ago

Wonder what shortlist of proposed names was.

gjvc• 4 years ago

https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=1440

rambojazz• 4 years ago

I'm so tired of TBL self-celebration. Every time I read about him, he's there reminding us that he was the one who created the web, like we owe him something. It's like he wants to take credit for everything the web is, or is built upon.

ck2• 4 years ago

I remember setting up usenet<->fidonet gateways pre-www

Absolutely wild what's changed in my lifetime.

33 years ago today I submitted a proposal for a system called the World Wide Web

Related Stories