"The most important thing that was new was the idea of URI-or URL, that any piece of information anywhere should have an identifier, which will allow you to get hold of it"
About this Quote
Berners-Lee isn’t bragging about code here; he’s naming a quiet philosophical break. The Web’s killer novelty wasn’t the browser sparkle or the hyperlink romance. It was the audacious claim that information should be addressable the way buildings are: not merely described, but locatable. A URI/URL turns a vague “that document over there” into a stable handle you can pass around, cite, retrieve, and build on. That’s not a technical flourish; it’s infrastructure for trust and coordination.
The intent is almost utopian in its plainness: give “any piece of information anywhere” a name, and you reduce friction between minds. Identifiers let strangers collaborate without negotiating bespoke directories, proprietary gateways, or institutional permissions. The subtext is a preference for openness over gatekeeping. If everything can be pointed to, nothing needs to be hoarded behind a single system’s internal map. The Web becomes less a product and more a shared grammar.
Context matters: late-1980s computing was a patchwork of incompatible networks, file paths, and databases. Finding something often meant knowing the right machine, the right protocol, the right person. Berners-Lee’s insight cuts through that parochialism with a single abstraction: an identifier that travels. It also foreshadows today’s fights. When URLs rot, platforms swallow links, or apps trap content behind opaque IDs, we’re not just losing convenience; we’re breaking the Web’s founding promise that information can be publicly referenced. In that sense, the quote reads like both origin story and warning label.
The intent is almost utopian in its plainness: give “any piece of information anywhere” a name, and you reduce friction between minds. Identifiers let strangers collaborate without negotiating bespoke directories, proprietary gateways, or institutional permissions. The subtext is a preference for openness over gatekeeping. If everything can be pointed to, nothing needs to be hoarded behind a single system’s internal map. The Web becomes less a product and more a shared grammar.
Context matters: late-1980s computing was a patchwork of incompatible networks, file paths, and databases. Finding something often meant knowing the right machine, the right protocol, the right person. Berners-Lee’s insight cuts through that parochialism with a single abstraction: an identifier that travels. It also foreshadows today’s fights. When URLs rot, platforms swallow links, or apps trap content behind opaque IDs, we’re not just losing convenience; we’re breaking the Web’s founding promise that information can be publicly referenced. In that sense, the quote reads like both origin story and warning label.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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