The Browser — WorldWideWeb NeXT Application WorldWideWeb The idea of hypertext preceded the World Wide Web by decades. But nearly all hypertext systems worked on local files. Tim Berners-Lee wanted to create a system that would work across networks so that people could link from a file on one machine to another file on another machine. WorldWideWeb wasn't just a programme for browsing files. It was a browser and editor. The introductory text reads: HyperMedia Browser/Editor, An excercise in global information availability by Tim Berners-Lee Today it's hard to imagine that web browsers might also be used to create web pages. It turned out that people were quite happy to write HTML by hand—something that Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues never expected. They thought that some kind of user interface would be needed for making web pages and links. That's what the WorldWideWeb browser provided. You could open a document in one window and "mark" it. Then, in a document in another window, you could create a link to the marked page.