33 years ago today I submitted a proposal for a system called the World Wide Web | Hacker News Reader

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

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234 pointsapp4soft94 comments

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

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

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?

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.

Note though that humanitarian aid (i.e. aid that's strictly focused on relief towards disaster zones) is generally harder and plausibly gets a lot less bang for the buck than efficiently targeted health- and development-aid. The latter also tends to get a lot less attention, which means even small-scale donors have opportunities to make a huge long-term difference if they direct their funds wisely.

The charity evaluators I'm aware of have pointed out that trying to evaluate the effectiveness of causes like disaster relief is extremely hard, despite how popular that cause is in general.

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...

That's the American Red Cross

They both work under the banner of the ICRC, which was involved in both the Haiti disaster (I'm talking about the Red Cross' incompetence, not the earthquake) as well as Ukraine operations.

It's hard to see how a corrupt incompetent organization would be different because an affiliated entity is operating in another country (Ukraine also has its own corruption problems).

After this much graft and incompetence, why trust them with more millions?

> 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

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.

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

lol

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,...).

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.

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.

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

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

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

Why, as it stands with the cost to get up there it is already Pay Per Veiw option with Amazon.

Oh no, not space! We were supposed to be stuck on this planet and die out through self-inflicted global warming.

We are stuck on this planet. There is no other realistic place mankind can live.

Near extinction from nuclear war is far more likely than global warming.

Since there are people working on sending a crewed mission to Mars as we speak, we might see a human colony there in our lifetime. So that would be one place for a start.

Don't worry, if we do get off this rock we'll just bring our problems with us. If we ruined one perfectly good planet odds are whatever state the next one is in it won't last long.

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.

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.

There is yet a fourth theory which suggests that, if the prior three theories did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.

I think you're describing web3

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!

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

Is it possible that someone is geeky enough to comment on HN, but not be familiar with HHGTTG?

That's the Infinite-Probability-Drive for ya.

I read it decades ago I don’t remember all the quotes

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

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.

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

See paper. All the “misinformation” ever spread before the internet was written on paper. Is paper evil?

See humans. They just talk to each other and make stuff up some of the time. Are humans evil?

I think we already know answer to this question, which is "yes".

I think this line of argument is not complete enough. Of course, everything can be used for good or evil. And I don’t think the internet should go away. Because it does a lot of really cool things.

BUT. The internet spreads disinformation (and other ills) at a scale that is off the charts compared to paper, word of mouth, or various forms of radio transmission. I think we have to honestly accept that its efficiency in both speed and reach is a bit of game changer/transcendental/new level.

We’ve relied on the lack of reach and speed of spread to create a “drag” on bad info in the past. People had time to “sleep on it.” Generational knowledge was accumulated. We’ve lost that, and it’s getting worse. The fact that this has evolved so quickly (just 30 years), has prevented society, which evolves slowly, from keeping up with and generating wisdom and rules to handle this new fire. Policy makers (mostly older) worldwide still don’t understand it and want to map experiences from their earlier formative years onto it.

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

> 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.

Happy birthday, the web.

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

Lightning only hits once.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

don’t forget the headers

> 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.

> 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.

Quite off-topic. We are talking about the the late 80s/early 90s here.

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.

That is a floccinaucinihilipilification.

Bless you!

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

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

...in the category of endofunctors?

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.

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

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.

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

Wonder what shortlist of proposed names was.

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

Absolutely wild what's changed in my lifetime.

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