[ih] The web as wind and whirlwind? (was Re: History from 1960s to 2025)

[John Levine]

It appears that Dave Crocker via Internet-history <dcrocker at bbiw.net> said:
>On 12/22/2025 7:45 PM, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
>>> The web permits output of content anywhere along a sequence.  This is
>>> not a trivial benefit, in terms of UX.
>> My recollection is that the early web was text and links, like Ted
>> Nelson's hypertext.  The embedded images were added a few years
>> later in Mosaic.
>
>Not what I encountered, by the time I was looking.  Had to be html. I 
>think Mosaic was already around by then.

It was alwyas HTML to encode hypertext, but you couldn't embed images
or other non-text material until Mosaic. I think the early web let you
link to a separate image, not unlike the way Gopher+ did.

In any event, I agree that the web can do a lot more things that Gopher could.
The question is whether Gopher's lighter footprint would have found it a
persistent niche if UofM hadn't priced it out of existence.

R's,
John