Early in the development of the WorldWideWeb, writing any paper document would prompt teasing, a wondering why paper was necessary any more. At the same time, there were never enough paper documents. The reply, `It's all on the Web!' is all very well but it doesn't yet give most people something to take down to the beach or onto the plane. At least, lest anyone imagine that the Web came from an urge for a paperless world or the idea of doing away with books, I can write a forward to a book to show my continued support for the medium.
The defense of those of us who claimed never to have time to produce paper documents was that paper is always out of date: and so it is. Of course the Web is always out of date too, so it's just a matter of timescale. By writing this book, Peter has taken on the task of describing something which is changing rapidly.
I first met Peter in a European Academic and Research Network (RARE) working group, and learned he was engaged in a project to put all Ireland's medieval manuscripts online in SGML. He was clearly equipped with two of the basic ingredients of the Web, and so it was not surprising that he got involved fairly early on.
There are many aspects of the Web which seem to change day by day, some which change occasionally, and others which have been expected to change for many years but never have. Perhaps the area which changes most often is the language used to exchange documents, HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. Changes to HTML allow more power of expression for online documents, and all sorts of fancy features, but they don't change the basic philosophy and way of working of the Web. Changes to network protocols happen less frequently, and are often invisible to the user, but allow the introduction of greater power in the future. Meanwhile, a change I had hoped for, to an interactive Web, is still, at the time of writing, waiting to happen.
As a foreword provides one with a little space to say something at a slight angle to the main run of the book, perhaps this is worth dwelling on a moment.
The Web was conceived as a way for people and machines to communicate using shared knowledge. As machines make dull peers, its rôle is principally human communication through shared knowledge. The idea is that when people communicate in any way, they are building a common set of concepts, facts and feelings. If people communicate by building a shared hypertext, this becomes explicit.
The original WorldWideWeb program was a hypertext editor which allowed links to be made as easily as followed (with the click of a mouse), hiding all the mess of HTML and URLs. For example, when reading a document, one could with a key combination create a new hypertext node linked to the selected text in the old document, and start typing in a comment, question, or clarification. Similarly, one could browse to some related resource on the web, hit a key, then go back to the document in question and make a link: `Hey, this has already been solved by Joe'.
When used in a team, this becomes a way of remembering why you did things in a particular way, of keeping the argument attached to the results. It leaves a legacy of a consistent common view of the world which you can give to a new member to get up to speed. At least, this was the original idea. The history from that point on has been of the development of browsers---that is, Web clients which didn't allow editing---and therefore of information on the Web which has been painstakingly produced by some dedicated individual or group for consumption for the wide world. The editors which are now coming out have therefor been billed as (and designed as) easier publishing tools, rather than group hypertext tools.
In a web which is world wide, the `few write, many read' model does make a lot of sense, for while we might be very interested in the inner workings of a few groups, notably those of which we are members, for the bulk of the rest of the information we tend to be more interested in quality of content and production. The high quality is only achieved by the use of the bottleneck of a production person or team. However, it is not the bulk of the information which consumes our attention: it is our work of the moment. We can make good use of all the excellent published material if we can weave references into our own hypertext jottings. If there is a continuum of hypertext from my note pad, though the diaries and letters and notes of my family and my groups, into the world of selected edited and published material, then we have a world in which the regular person has been re-enabled as a writer, a thinker and a linker, rather than just a clicker.
The difference in the Web is that a web to which one can contribute, even in a private way, seems friendlier than a read-only web which emulates more a million TV channels.
That is one difference between the Web as it is described in this book and the Web which we might see in the future. There are many other big changes to come, and I think Peter will have pointed to some of them. However the essence of global hypertext which is the Web will not change much while you read this book. So welcome to the Web, welcome to this book, and have fun.
Tim Berners-Lee