“So TimBL built a hypertext that worked across the Internet. Lots of computer scientists had been chiseling away at the problem for years, but TimBL ignored the entire body of theory and pasted together the simplest possible version with one-way pointers carrying no guarantees of what (if anything) they pointed at. No computer scientist could have conceived of anything so tenuous and fragile.
That turned out to be the World Wide Web, and TimBL is now famous.”
— Tim Bray, XML People