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This document is a work in progress, last updated on 17/06/2023.
The Web
The first proposal for the world wide web was written in March 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. The idea was to create a "web" of "hypertext documents" which could be viewed by anyone with a computer and a browser made specifically for viewing things in this web. I'm sure with enough time I could write a very long essay about the early web, but I don't think there's a better way to learn about the web than learning from the very first website;
http://info.cern.ch/ which is still up and running to this day. Tim is also still alive, and has a website of his own,
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ that you can explore to learn even more.
Clicking through the first website, you'll find the pages are all very simple in design and layout. This is because while they are written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), there is no CSS (Cascading Stylesheet) to style the pages, because the web predates CSS by a few years. The early web was very much focused on hypertext. Hypertext is basically just text with the ability to link to other text. The web was intended to be a network of hypertext linking back and forth between eachother, hence the name "web".
Tim also wrote a book, weaving the web, which is available from many online retailers as well as in lots of libraries,
it's also available on the internet archive to borrow and if you are interested in the early history of the web, as well as what Tim Berners-Lee thought of the web and his intentions for it, and the future of the web, at the time of writing in 2000 was, I highly recommend giving it a read. I've also included some quotes below.
The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect - to help people work together - and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. What we believe, endorse, agree with and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web. We all have to ensure that the society we build with the Web is of the sort we intend.
The essence of working together in a weblike way is that we function in groups — groups of two, twenty and twenty million. We have to learn how to do this on the Web. Key to any group's existence is the integrity of the group itself, which entails privacy and confidentiality. Privacy involves the ability of each person to dictate what can and cannot be done with their own personal information. There is no excuse for privacy policies not to be consensual, because the writing, checking and acceptance of such policies can all be done automatically. Agreements on privacy are part of the greatest prerequisite for a weblike society: trust. We need to be able to trust the membership of groups, the parties engaging in e-commerce, the establishment of who owns what information, and much more.
That's the beauty of the Web: it's a web, not a hierarchy.
The media may portray the Web as a wonderful, interactive place where we have limitless choice because don't have to take what the TV producer has decided we should see next. But my definition of interactive includes not just the ability to choose, but also the ability to create. We ought to be able not only to find any kind of document on the Web, but also to create any kind of document, easily. We should be able not only to follow links, but to create them - between all sorts of media. We should be able not only to interact with other people, but to create with other people. Intercreativity is the process of making things or solving problems together. If interactivity is not just sitting there passively in front of a display screen, then intercreativity is not just sitting there in front of something 'interactive'.
We certainly need a structure that will avoid those two catastrophes: the global uniform McDonald's monoculture, and the isolated Heaven's Gate cults that understand only themselves. By each of us spreading our attention evenly between groups of different size, from personal to global, we help avoid these extremes. Link by link we build paths of understanding across the web of humanity. We are the threads holding the world together. As we do this, we naturally end up with a few Web sites in very high demand, and a continuum down to the huge number of Web sites with only rare visitors. In other words, appealing though equality between peers seems, such a structure by its uniformity is not optimal. It does not pay sufficient attention to global co-ordination, and it can require too many clicks to get from problem to solution.
My takeaway after reading a lot of Tim's work was very much of the idea that the web is about the connections we make and about creating more strands to form those connections with. The web isn't just about having information readily available, but having the option to readily make available your own information, and linking that information with other information. The web isn't just meant to be about consuming media but rather it is meant to be a tool to allow people to share their own media, in a variety of formats, and to form connections between their media and other media.
This is really evident in the practices of a lot of early personal websites, and traces of it can still be found today, though certainly not to the same extent. You'll find on my site, and many others like it, the existence of a links page, with buttons that lead to other people's sites, who in turn have their own links page, with more buttons, perhaps even a button leading back to the site you just came from, creating an almost literal web of sites that connect to eachother with anchor points that we attach to each button leading to each site.
Most sites also still tend to have the general practice of what hypertext's original purpose was; to enable the linking between text on different pages. You can start on the home menu of a site and from there be lead to another page to another page to another page, all within the same site, or even across different sites, traversing the web as you go. This is what I believe the web should be like, but increasingly I'm finding that more and more sites have started to only link within themselves and not to many other sites, or when you do find people linking to other sites you might find yourself reaching deadends again and again. The web is meant to be one big interconnected web, not a series of isolated webs with little to no connections to them. This is especially prevalent with the rise of single page sites like carrd, where the internet is just to throw a wall of text or images onto one page and call it a day, with no links to other sites, and no links to other pages on the same site. Sure, some people do have links on their carrd that lead elsewhere, but most often these are links to major social media platforms like twitter and instagram, not to other new and unfound sites.
If I wanted to see someone's content on instagram, I could search them up on instagram, I don't need a carrd to link me to their instagram, I need a carrd to link me to their site, or to other sites that they like, or to other sites that they think I might like. So I can continue traversing the web, on different strands of the web, not just traversing back and forth on the same set of strands until I reach a deadend and have to traverse backwards, hoping that the strand I'm on will remain when I next wish to return to where I was before.