ABSTRACT
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee described his vision of what would come to be called the World Wide Web (WWW, hereinafter referred to as Web). He based his proposal on the notion that a “web” or “mesh” of hyperlinked documents (papers, commentaries, etc.) might be more supportive of information preservation, information sharing, and collaboration activities than more restrictive £xed hierarchies or “trees.” Furthermore, he argued that information would be more useful if the relations among documents could be given meaningful labels. He illustrated his ideas using a diagram (Berners-Lee 1990). In his diagram he used circles called “nodes” to depict individual documents and concepts (images, etc.), and he used labeled lines called “links” to express relations. Node-link node triples in his diagram expressed propositions. For example, a circle enclosing the words “This Document” was linked by a line to another circle containing the words “A Proposal,” and appearing midway along the line was the relational term “describes.” Hence this node-link-node triple expressed the proposition: This Document describes A Proposal. Berners-Lee used this meaningful diagram to express how documents, hypertext, and other media could be shared over a network of computers that would also support conferencing and other collaborative
activities. In referring to his diagram, he wrote (Berners-Lee 1990; reprinted in Berners-Lee 1999, pp. 213-216):
The Web infrastructure for integrating and hyperlinking multimedia (Berners-Lee’s “client-server” model) can support methods of knowledge sharing and collaboration that are limited perhaps only by the designer’s imagination. Ironically, however, many “pages” on the Web, especially those that are intended for use in education and distance learning, appear very much like pages from the Gutenberg Bible: Somewhere near the top will be a graphic of some sort (e.g., a picture of a £sh for course material in biology), and below it will simply be an outline and some scanned-in text, through which one proceeds just as if using a printed book. One might wonder if the current evolution of the Web is in some ways simply reinventing the wheel and doing so in a way that fails to capitalize on the capabilities and possibilities that the Web offers.
