I telnetted to the nearest VAX from my Win 3.1 PC. I then telnetted to the X.25 PAD and used that to go via the US to Switzerland and CERN. It looked just like gopher and WAIS to me and that's how I reported back - "it looks the same as gopher".
When Tim BL invented www, html and that, browsers were telnet and graphics was a nonsense.
WAIS was modeled after the built in DigitalLibrarian software. You would select a site in the upper pane, and enter a search term in the box in the middle, and a list of documents would come back in the bottom pane that you could double click and open. Very search engine like.
Gopher was structured and I think Gemini today still sticks with the format. You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
WWW didn't seem like much in comparison because they were freeform documents without app level navigation support and there wasn't support for images or much formatting and people had not learned to make web pages so it was really hard to see the future of what it would grow to become.
I'm not known for picking winners :-(
The last time I tried about the only site that worked was useit.com, former home of Nielsen Norman UX experts ;-)
Something was lost along the way.
(Nowadays you need a separate wiki engine on a site to be able to do that)
document.designMode = 'on'I don't think a web where every page is globally editable by default would be a good idea, but I can't imagine at all how it would work without a backend, unless all of the changes are just local. But that seems pointless.
The user makes a request, and then does whatever they like with the answer. Not just whatever is sensible, but whatever they want to do.
If that concept somehow became accepted again... I think the accessible web might well become a solved problem, rather than an endless slog.
Making notes for your own consumption?
No you don’t. These browser simply PUTs the request and your web server simply edits the document. Versioning is optional, of course.
The original source code isn't really involved, which is a shame, since it is actually available.
IMHO this should have been (something along the lines of) GNUstep + TimBL's original code (mirror: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb) + Emscripten + getting Emscripten to work with ObjC. Now, that would have been cool.
This is the most commented HN posting on this from that time (2019):
The performance would likely be comparable %)
I'm pretty sure the CERN WorldWideWeb application is also included in the "bonus software" HDD, but I'm on my phone right now and can't confirm. :-)
:-)
But it makes sense it is a GUI browser since it was developed on a NeXT
I'm having trouble pinning down when WorldWideWeb got inline image support, but based on https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/Feat... I'm guessing sometime between 1992 and 1994, when there are screenshots with inline images, so maybe after Lynx was published.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-cern...
I was also disappointed that the editing went away after the first browser. (There was "Amaya" which had editing, but it was a research thing and not a commonly used browser.)