How the 404 Error Created the World Wide Web
Popular Mechanics
By Jesse Dunietz, Dec 5, 2016
Good Enough vs Perfection! How fault-tolerant is your solution?
I remember having similar thoughts about how the World Wide Web grew so fast. Prior to the World Wide Web, there already had been lots and lots of academic literature and research done on hypertext/hypermedia.
Tremendous effort/thinking had been put into schemes to upkeep the integrity of the links - and this ultimately slowed down the development of practical systems. Most of the solutions were unwieldy and impractical.
Similarly the popularity of HTML vs the more formal markup languages like GML and SGML points to the fact that HTML was a lot more fault-tolerant language - putting the onus on the creator (or individual) to ensure system integrity.
I also see similarities in human nature (and by extension social and economic systems) - the more fault-tolerant the system, the more they tend to be popular, pervasive and successful.
Key takeaway:
This is a classic philosophical difference between Engineering (good enough) solutions and Science (complete/perfect) answers. The real-world tends to favor the Engineering paradigm.
By Jesse Dunietz, Dec 5, 2016
Good Enough vs Perfection! How fault-tolerant is your solution?
I remember having similar thoughts about how the World Wide Web grew so fast. Prior to the World Wide Web, there already had been lots and lots of academic literature and research done on hypertext/hypermedia.
Tremendous effort/thinking had been put into schemes to upkeep the integrity of the links - and this ultimately slowed down the development of practical systems. Most of the solutions were unwieldy and impractical.
Similarly the popularity of HTML vs the more formal markup languages like GML and SGML points to the fact that HTML was a lot more fault-tolerant language - putting the onus on the creator (or individual) to ensure system integrity.
I also see similarities in human nature (and by extension social and economic systems) - the more fault-tolerant the system, the more they tend to be popular, pervasive and successful.
Key takeaway:
This is a classic philosophical difference between Engineering (good enough) solutions and Science (complete/perfect) answers. The real-world tends to favor the Engineering paradigm.
The 404 did for Hypertextwhat the zero did for Math: It was obvious ... but formalizing and creating a notation for it revolutionized the rest of the system.
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