links and the diffusion of the web

Dear Web Historians,

I seem to remember reading a discussion about how the Web's initial growth was believed to be due in part to *not* requiring permission to link. Unlike other bidirectional hypertext systems that had a centralized link database, anyone could link wherever they liked using a URL in their HTML.

The best source I could find so far for this was on p. 38-39 of TimBL's Weaving the Web:

"""
For an international hypertext system to be worthwhile, of course, many people would have to post information. The physicist would not find much on quarks, nor the art student on Van Gogh, if many people and organizations did not make their information available in the first place. Not only that, but much information -- from phone numbers to current ideas and today's menu -- is constantly changing, and is only as good as it is up-to-date. That meant that anyone (authorized) should be able to read it. There could be no central control. To publish information, it would be put on any server, a computer that shared its resources with other computers, and the person operating it defined who could contribute, modify, and access material on it.

...

The key to resolving this was the design of the URI. It is the most fundamental innovation of the Web, because it is the one specification that every Web program, client or server, anywhere uses when any link is followed. Once a document had a URI, it could be posted on a server and found by a browser.
"""

If you know of any other discussions about this, especially in the context of allowing for broken links, I would really appreciate hearing from you. I'm basically trying to highlight that if wasn't for Tim's insight to allow for broken links, perhaps we wouldn't have a Web with links at all.

//Ed

Received on Tuesday, 22 September 2015 19:11:55 UTC