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w e a v i n g      t h e      w e b

zip codes, the last part of the URI means whatever the given server wants it to mean. It doesn't have to be a file name. It can be a table name or an account name or the coordinates of a map or whatever. The client never tries to figure out what it means: It just asks for it. This important fact enabled a huge diversity of types of information systems to exist on the Web. And it allowed the Web to immediately pick up all the NNTP and FTP content from the Internet.

At the same time that I was developing the Web, several other Internet-based information systems were surfacing. Brewster Kahle at Thinking Machines had architected their latest powerful parallel processor. Now he saw a market for the big machines as search engines and designed the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) protocol to access them to form a system like the Web but without links-only search engines.

Clifford Newman at the Information Sciences Institute proposed his Prospero distributed file system as an Internet-based information system, and Mark McCahill and colleagues at the University of Minnesota were developing a campus-wide information system called gopher, named for the university's mascot. To emphasize that all information systems could be incorporated into the Web, I defined two new URI prefixes that could appear before the double slash—"gopher:" and "wais:"—that would give access to those spaces. Both systems took off much more quickly than the Web and I was quite concerned at the time that they would suffocate it.

HTTP had a feature called format negotiation that allowed a client to say what sorts of data format it could handle, and allow the server to return a document in any one of them. I expected all kinds of data formats to exist on the Web. I also felt there had to be one common, basic lingua franca that any computer would be required to understand. This was to be a simple hypertext language that would be able to provide basic hypertext navigation, menus, and simple documentation such as help files, the minutes