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The Web is Agreement

Web stan­dards are a col­lec­tion of intan­gi­bles that we col­lec­tive­ly agree to be true. They’re our sto­ries. They’re our col­lec­tive, con­sen­sus real­i­ty. They’re what web browsers agree to imple­ment and what we agreed to use. The Web is agreement. 

Tim Berners-Lee Announces the World Wide Web Foundation

I wrote a memo say­ing, ​“We should have a glob­al hyper­text sys­tem to fix this.” The memo, I dis­trib­uted it to a few peo­ple but there’s nowhere real­ly to dis­trib­ute it to at CERN because CERN is a physics lab. It did­n’t have com­mit­tees for build­ing pro­grams and hyper­text systems.

So what hap­pened was basi­cal­ly noth­ing for eigh­teen months.

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