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.
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"
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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. "
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...