• Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 hours ago

    This has been mangled up by history. The important parts of the World Wide Web are having hypertext (basically links inside the document to other documents) and being networked (those links can take you to a completely different server). Apple’s Hypercard had hypertext, but it wasn’t networked. Usenet was networked, but had no hypertext.

    This is laid out in Tim Berners-Lee’s original 1989 proposal for the web while he was at CERN:

    https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

    Gopher has all the qualities he was talking about. Gopher was a different kind of World Wide Web. We decided against that particular route, and for mostly good reasons, IMO.