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RE: Expertise and Innovation - was Re: Non-Borg serv

• To: 'Joe English' <jenglish@f...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Expertise and Innovation - was Re: Non-Borg servers can authenticate Borg clients (Was Re: Re: Cookies at XML Europe 2004 -- Call for Participation)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2004 09:55:37 -0600

That's it as I remember.  When it was mentioned prior to that, 
it was considered trivial. People forget that prior to 
the opening up of the Internet to commercial use, it wasn't 
a candidate for global hypermedia.  The fact of a 
free distribution on a network capable of distributing 
immediately and without regard to borders to people without 
funds (students, researchers, etc.) did the rest.  It 
wasn't a good technology but it was ripe.  Tim got the 
brass ring so he deserves the applause.  I don't consider 
getting it to work across the Internet to be trivial.

Anytime I start to believe the hype about the web as the 
most important invention of..., or how it is fundamentally 
changing society or enabling real democracy, I read the 
statistics on the top ten search items of the year and 
the research on power-law distributions.  "Same as it 
ever was."

So do we have to refer to Tim as STimBL now?  Seems rather 
Tolkienesque.

len


From: Joe English [mailto:jenglish@f...]

Michael Kay wrote:

> My first reaction was quite different but equally wrong. I thought he
> was totally naive to imagine that he could get the world to agree on one
> standard for doing this stuff. I still don't know how he succeeded in
> grabbing mindshare. Most good ideas fall on stony ground, why didn't
> this one?

My best guess: it wasn't Tim B-L who got everyone to agree,
it was NCSA.  Mosaic was a sufficiently compelling improvement
over the various gopher clients then in use that everyone
switched over.  The "standard format" was largely ignored;
people didn't create documents for "The Web", they created
them for Mosaic.

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