Why the Web's 30th "Birthday" Is a Myth

The reality of the 30th "birthday" of the World Wide Web is that, on this August date in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN, aiming to create a method of tracking complex documents. His supervisor wrote "vague, but exciting" on the 1989 version. The 1991 version was submitted to the International Hypertext Conference in San Antonio, where it landed with a thud. Instead of being greeted rapturously as a world-altering innovation, Berners-Lee's paper received a lousy poster session, the most liminal kind of acceptance research can receive at a conference. For poster sessions, researchers usually generate a visual of their work, tack it up to wall or easel, and stand nearby, prepared to answer mostly desultory questions from conference-goers. Berners-Lee, however, had created a jazzier version of a poster. The precursor to the World Wide Web was a demonstration, running on a NeXt computer, inconveniently located near an outdoor fountain where conference organizers had set up a tequila fountain.

Reactions were as tepid as they were tipsy. Other attendees failed to recall it, although the organizer who had relegated the CERN proposal to a poster session was unrepentant about his failure to have spotted the proposal's revolutionary potential. "Damned right!!" he barked when I pointed out to him that the International Hypertext Conference had become infamous for its treatment of the proposal that became the World Wide Web. "It wouldn't scale!"

By then, we knew damned well the World Wide Web would scale. We also knew that its links and plain language URLs made the Wild West of Darapanet, Bitnet, Edunet, and Internet access to a public that wouldn't have bothered with complex alphanumeric strings, bristling with punctuation that had previously served as URLs.

But Berners-Lee was not too far ahead of his time for his idea to be accessible. In fact, the "Lost in Hyperspace" problem, identical to the problem that gave rise Berners-Lee's proposal, had been presented in several conference papers at the first hypertext conference in 1987. Moreover, Berners-Lee was preaching to what amounted to the choir, the single audience on the planet all too aware of the difficulty of locating content situated in nodes and joined with links due to a lack of naming protocols.

The first public demo of the World Wide Web tanked because Berners-Lee failed to use the right schemas to introduce his ideas to what was an ideal audience. First, he could have represented the web as hacking tidy plots and helpful street signs from what had previously been a dense jungle of mostly disconnected resources. Second, the world's first website was up and running already at CERN, using plain language to identify locations. Third, this subtle but essential improvement simplified entering, linking, locating, and recalling virtual locations online by using HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that Berners-Lee and his collaborators had created to bring uniformity to the way all servers handled links, menus, content, and online help.

The lesson from the world-changing demo that went unnoticed is not that tequila fountains and demos don't mix. Nor that the conference-goers were idiots unprepared to spot innovations. Instead, the lesson lies in the importance of using schemas to frame ideas, particularly novel ones, by using concepts already familiar to your audience. The more you present innovation as discontinuous with the technology that preceded it, the more likely you are to puzzle your audience. Or to leave them blind to the truly innovative nature of a proposal. Or a demo of the World Wide Web, especially if the tequila bubbling from the fountain outside is free.