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Metaphors We Web By

maggieappleton.com · 2,026 words · saved by 1 readers

A history of our metaphorical understanding of the web

Table of Contents Table of Contents In Tim Berners-Lee’s original pitch https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html for The Web, he described it as a “non-linear text system” for notes. It was designed for scientific researchers and academics to pass around documents that would otherwise be printed on physical paper. The point of the web was to mimic long, text-based, paper documents, but simply make them easier to move around. Paper documents were the original metaphor for the web. It’s no surprise we started with paper. At the moment of the web’s conception, computers were objects that liv

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