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

[Dave Crocker]

On 12/23/2025 12:56 PM, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> It was alwyas HTML to encode hypertext,

My original comment was only meant to be about the requirement for 
html.  It was a considerable barrier to adoption, especially given the 
lack of -- or poor quality of -- tools originally available for creating 
it.  It was in the ballpark of requiring users to learn a programming 
language, at a time when average users had no background for that.  (And 
comparing with what average users now can do, it's quite a change over 
the 35 years.)

All this got worked out, over time.  Obviously.  But initially, everyone 
had text files, which made gopher extremely useful, far more easily.


> 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.

Might have lasted longer, but the considerable utility of the web's core 
design and the demonstrable extensibility of both http and html almost 
certainly guaranteed gopher would lose to the point of extinction.  Note 
that the web could emulate gopher but gopher could not emulate the web.


d/

-- 
Dave Crocker

Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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