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weaving the web

My vision was to somehow combine Enquire's external links with hypertext and the interconnection schemes I had developed for RPC. An Enquire program capable of external hypertext links was the difference between imprisonment and freedom, dark and light. New webs could be made to bind different computers together, and all new systems would be able to break out and reference others. Plus, anyone browsing could instantly add a new node connected by a new link.

The system had to have one other fundamental property: It had to be completely decentralized. That would be the only way a new person somewhere could start to use it without asking for access from anyone else. And that would be the only way the system could scale, so that as more people used it, it wouldn't get bogged down. This was good Internet-style engineering, but most systems still depended on some central node to which everything had to be connected—and whose capacity eventually limited the growth of the system as a whole. I wanted the act of adding a new link to be trivial; if it was, then a web of links could spread evenly across the globe.

So long as I didn't introduce some central link database, everything would scale nicely. There would be no special nodes, no special links. Any node would be able to link to any other node. This would give the system the flexibility that was needed, and be the key to a universal system. The abstract document space it implied could contain every single item of information accessible over networks—and all the structure and linkages between them.

Hypertext would be most powerful if it could conceivably point to absolutely anything. Every node, document—whatever it was called—would be fundamentally equivalent in some way. Each would have an address by which it could be referenced. They would all exist together in the same space—the information space.