[ih] URl construct, etc

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org>

    >> What makes this a more interesting topic is that the design of the URL
    >> meta-construct has essentially permitted the Web to coopt all other
    >> independent work.

    > That's very much an IETF creation... it started at the March 1992 IETF
    > San Diego living documents BoF & X.500/WAIS/WWW BoF.

Several other people have already commented on this point, but if I can add
one tiny bit, I'd like to point to TBL's original NetNews post announcing the
WWW:

  Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
  From: timbl at info .cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee)
  Date: 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT
  Subject: WorldWideWeb: Summary

  The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing
  protocols (FTP, NNTP) ..
  ...
  Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and making at
  least one link into your web from another. In fact, any file available by
  anonymous FTP can be immediately linked into a web.

which seems to show that the ftp:// syntax was already fully supported as of
that date.


    > From: Larry Press <lpress at csudh.edu>

    > I also saw [Ted Nelson] in the mid-late 70s at an Asilomar workshop at
    > which time he had a small group of people trying to implement Xanadu,
    > but as far as I know, it was never in general use

They kept working at it, and did in fact release some stuff in the 1990s.
There was a long story in 'Wired' in 1995 that talked about it:

  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html

	Noel