I'm making a small documentary about the invention of the World Wide Web and am reading Tim Berners-Lee's book Weaving the Web. One passage is confusing me. It says that he programmed the browser to follow links not only to files on HTTP servers, but also to Internet news articles and newsgroups. The passage then says those articles were retrieved using FTP rather than HTTP, making a huge amount of existing Internet information available as hypertext pages.
My understanding is that Usenet articles were distributed and retrieved using NNTP, with articles often stored in local spool files. So how did this work from a user's point of view? Did the browser fetch articles through FTP, NNTP, or an archive of some kind, and then display them as pages? I'm not a web developer, but I'd like to understand the historical technical detail.
2 Answers
The key idea is that the Web was designed as a common interface over several existing Internet services. A browser could recognize different kinds of links and use the appropriate protocol behind the scenes. HTTP was used for Web documents, while FTP could retrieve files and news-related resources could be accessed through news protocols or gateways. The browser then displayed the result in a navigable format, so the user experienced it as part of the Web even though the underlying service was not using HTTP.
This did not convert Usenet itself into hypertext or change how Usenet distributed articles. It simply allowed existing information to be reached through the same browser interface.
The passage should not be read as saying that FTP replaced NNTP. FTP is older than HTTP, and Usenet’s normal network protocol was NNTP. However, articles or newsgroup archives could also be made available as files through FTP, and early browsers supported FTP links. Berners-Lee may have been referring to such accessible archives, a particular implementation, or simplifying the explanation.
In practical terms, a browser could receive a link, determine its protocol, retrieve the resource using that protocol, and render the result for the reader. That was the demonstration: the Web could overlay and connect information that already existed on different Internet systems.
Right—FTP was not a newer or more capable successor to HTTP here. It was simply one of the existing ways the browser could retrieve linked material, while NNTP remained the standard way to exchange live Usenet articles.
So the important part is the browser’s ability to follow links across different services, not that every Usenet article was literally transferred using FTP.