IC Online Interview with Robert Cailliau If you can instantly edit, you don't need URLs?
Right. You start out by writing your own set of documentary pages on your local disk. Then you would click your insertion point in the browser. Like in every good application, if you wanted to put the insertion point, you'd click once. If you wanted to make something work or to follow a link, you clicked twice. There was no distinction between editing mode and browser mode. We lost all that along the way. What we see now is mostly inflated rubbish.
So you lost that because you decided to release it to the public?
We lost it because we couldn't port it easily from NeXTStep. Writing an editor is much harder than writing a passive browser. The guy who brings out a passive browser spreads it faster, but it's not necessarily better for the user.

For want of an editor, the web was lost...