[Jasper_]

But the web wasn't about listening to music at the start! It started with organizing documents on a network, at CERN. And it took over existing document platforms by adding a simple point-and-click browser user interface to them, inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?)

The modern, more economic web, wouldn't come until Netscape added form fields and cookies, at the behest of some of the original owners. And there were a ton of people at Netscape making these decisions about their vision of the future of the web. In-browser music listening wouldn't come until Macromedia, Disney and Microsoft pushed their vision for a "multi-media web"; browsers wouldn't build native support until much, much later.

So yes, we absolutely decided what the web would be about, and built technology to match that vision.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> inspired by HyperCard (where do you think the "hyperlink" got its name?)

I'm as much of a HyperCard fan as (almost) anyone else, but that is almost certainly not where the term "hyperlink" comes from. Ted Nelson used the word "link" back in the mid 1960s, in the context of another coinage of his, "hypertext". The historical record is already a little unclear about whether or not he was using hyperlink that early, but by the time HyperCard came to be, the term was already differentiated from a "simple link", with some level of implication caused by the "hyper" prefix that it was most likely on another computer/server. The most HyperCard could offer was a link into a different stack.

The "hyper" prefix predated Hypercard, and it's meaning in the context of information processing/retrieval/presentation meant more than the majority of links that HyperCard offered (even though they were also great). Yes, I know that the wikipedia page on the word "hyperlink" claims that HyperCard "may have been the first use", but the cited reference for that claim offers no evidence for it whatsoever.

[cmrdporcupine]

I remember a whole fascinating section about various hypertext system in a mid-80s issue of Byte. I spent hours pouring over the screenshots in it.

EDIT: here's a good summary article of pre-WWW hypertext systems from the 80s https://fibery.io/blog/hypertext-tools-from-the-80s/

[wpietri]

Exactly. To get the beginnings of real adoption, a technology has to do something better. A specific thing. Better enough that people switch.

The early web's competition was things like FTP, Gopher, and email-driven apps (e.g., Listservs, the Usenet Oracle). Plus paper-based stuff, like department phone books, mailing documents around, etc. It was hugely better than any of those for many common uses, so adoption was rapid.

Once you have a critical mass of users, then it can make sense to add other things in. But for that first audience, we can't be vague, selling some shining future that will happen eventually.

[nappy]

and much better, to justify switching costs.

[eesmith]

Mosaic supported form fields, before Netscape even started. Eg, https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html .

As I recall, one of the example CGI programs from NCSA presented a form to fill out a Papa John's order, which was then sent via the email-to-fax gateway. Which, now that I think of it, was indeed more "economic".

Cookies was definitely a Netscape thing, for profit making - a shopping cart for MCI.

[corndoge]

I don't see how the first two paragraphs support your conclusion here

[bshipp]

The first two paragraphs reiterate that the early web was very much a reflection of the hypertext transfer protocol and hypertext markup language in that it literally just handled text pages with links in them. and it did it pretty well. It wasn't designed to handle streaming video or client-side processing/page rendering via Javascript or any of the innumerable other elements added on to it later. It was designed to do one thing well.