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Comment by exsf0859 | Hacker News Reader

There were tons of alternative hypertext systems before the world wide web.

Major reasons WWW succeeded:

1) Open standard, no license required. (My understanding is that TB-L worked hard to make this happen.)

2) A forgiving text-based format that was trivial to author, serve, and display. And evolve with forward/backwards compatibility.

3) One-way links. (Many other HyperText projects were hung up on bi-directional links.)

4) URLs didn't require any centralized authority other than already-existing DNS.

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5). 404s. Other systems went for total consistency. Good luck with that!

When the www came out I use to get there through gopher. I preferred gopher until I was able to get an ip address. The ip address made it possible to get images with text. Perviously there were separate downloads.

Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom. Which distinguished it from gopher.

yeah, off the top of my head I remember gopher, hytelnet, I think there was some screwy thing built on finger, even.

There was also an amiga format that was getting picked up for documentation and gamemanuals/guides, but the name is escaping me.

> A forgiving text-based format that was trivial to author, serve, and display. And evolve with forward/backwards compatibility.

I'm not disagreeing, but that's certainly a less often heard characterization of SGML ;) and also, not sure evolution of the HTML vocabulary past 4.x, or lack thereof, supports this point considering there are entire universes of additional syntax such as CSS and philosophical schools of thoughts only there to avoid having to write plain markup attributes. The metaphor also is apt, since, like the universe, CSS syntax seems to expand faster than the speed of light.

You don't have to use all of that though, it's optional. A fairly basic but serviceable HTML document that looks decent is still pretty easy.

It probably hit just the right time in terms of available CPU power and network speed for a text-based format to get accepted.

The web could have plausibly existed as early as FTP did. Which would have been 1972. Plenty of documents from that era had URL-like manual links of the form "pub/foo/bar.txt at MIT-AI", and many FTP servers supported anonymous login and were fast enough for real-time text document retrieval.

It is kind of embarrassing that it took 20 years to invent URLs and browsers.

I wrote a networked hypertext system in 1985 but it used a binary "page" format to save bandwidth. The GUI used was GEM.

Another road not taken could have been to define a rich text format in ASN.1 and build a browser on top of the OSI network stack.

Phd needed to understand Asn.1 and … osi network stack. Good luck.

Not really any conceptual difference between ASN.1 and something like Cap'n Proto.

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