[MsMowz]

I don't think that's really true; in the original WWW proposal[1], Tim Berners-Lee specifically talks about using the web to build applications and he considered hypermedia applications to be only a matter of time and resources (about which he was correct).

[1]: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

[dmitriid]

> Tim Berners-Lee specifically talks about using the web to build applications

And those applicatons are, and I quote:

=== start quote ===

Specific Applications

The following are three examples of specific places in which the proposed system would be immediately useful. There are many others.

Development Project Documentation.

The Remote procedure Call project has a skeleton description using Enquire. Although limited, it is very useful for recording who did what, where they are, what documents exist, etc. Also, one can keep track of users, and can easily append any extra little bits of information which come to hand and have nowhere else to be put. Cross-links to other projects, and to databases which contain information on people and documents would be very useful, and save duplication of information.

Document retrieval.

The CERNDOC system provides the mechanics of storing and printing documents. A linked system would allow one to browse through concepts, documents, systems and authors, also allowing references between documents to be stored. (Once a document had been found, the existing machinery could be invoked to print it or display it).

The "Personal Skills Inventory".

Personal skills and experience are just the sort of thing which need hypertext flexibility. People can be linked to projects they have worked on, which in turn can be linked to particular machines, programming languages, etc.

=== end quote ===

The web, even in Tim Berners-Lee's vision, is strictly about documents.

In comparison, by 1989 France's Minitel had over three million installed terminals with over 6000 different services [1]. Many of them (mail-order, games, ticket purchases etc.) cannot be expressed in a document-centric system. But even then (and I'm pretty sure Tim-Berners Lee had been aware of Minitel), the web was presented as a system for viewing and sharing documents, and the job of applications was left to applications.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

[tl]

It depends on your level of reductionism; if you believe in Unix-style "everything is a file" then "everything is a document, including the applications that edit other documents" isn't a massive conceptual leap.

[dmitriid]

Time Berners-Lee:

literally describes web applications as handling documents and only documents. Bases HTML on SGML, which is literally a language to describe documents, and only documents. Calls the system, a ypertext system. Lists exclusively text systems as systems one might connect to.

In the conclusion writes (emphasis mine): "We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards."

HN in 2021:

no-no-no, that's reductionism, what he really meant was full-featured applications, it's not "a massive conceptual leap"

====

Edit.

Time Berners-Lee in an interview [1]:

"It was designed in order to make it possible to get at documentation and in order to be able to get people — students working with me, contributing to the project, for example — to be able to come in and link in their ideas, so that we wouldn’t lose it all if we didn’t debrief them before they left. Really, it was designed to be a collaborative workspace for people to design on a system together. "

[1] https://achievement.org/achiever/sir-timothy-berners-lee/#in...

[edoceo]

Here:

> would be immediately useful. There are many others.

Aren't we at the "many others" point of Sir Tim's theory?

You're using his three specific examples as if he was talking about the limit of the thing. I think he was talking about the start of something big.

[dmitriid]

You sound like a stereotypical school teacher discussing literature. "What did the author mean, when he wrote the doo was red? Let's look at the evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27282030 Ah, yes, definitely fully-featured applications"

[runawaybottle]

Let’s be real though, semantic html5 mostly describes an article on a blog site than a robust web application.

Paragraph tags are first class versus a Modal in HTML.

[MsMowz]

This is just playing a game with semantics; the form, canvas, dialog, and keygen elements are also first class. Nobody is saying that the web isn't primarily documents.