On: Physicists Say They Have Found A Higgs Boson

[berntb]

I agree with your general point, but your example is doubtful.

Gopher existed before WWW and filled the same niche. It wasn't as elegant, but it (or something else) would have grown up without WWW.

The reason, in my cynical opinion, why the web took over from Gopher was not that it was technically superior, but that it allowed people to add pictures to their documents.

[micampe → berntb]

The most important difference between Gopher and HTTP were not images, it was hyperlinks instead of a hierarchical structure.

[Aloisius → micampe]

Gopher had links. At its core, gopher was links. It was a hierarchical menu system of proto-URLs (host port and path).

The primary benefits of www over gopher at the time were that the web supported text input (you had to use wais just to search gopher and you couldn't build say, a forum) and html which allowed embedded images and formatting.

[cpa → berntb]

> it allowed people to add pictures to their documents.

Which very well may be a good definition of technical superiority for the lay man :)

[cygx → berntb]

You're actually strengthening his point:

1. Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota, so it comes from academia as well

2. Part of what killed it off was the University trying to make money from it through licensing fees

[Aardwolf → berntb]

Exactly, and we all know the internet cannot be the internet if it doesn't have cat pictures.

[InclinedPlane → berntb]

The key innovation of the web was that it used a human editable markup language that allowed links to other content to be intermingled with content. This turned out to be more revolutionary than anyone would have thought.