I don't believe in the sort of eureka moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that pro… - Tim Berners-Lee

Cool URIs don't change

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use. The passing of this threshold accelerated by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and with new ones.

At CERN there was a credo meant to avoid unnecessary labors, it said that when acquiring new technology: Buy, Don't Build. There were several commercial hypertext editors and I thought we could just add some internet code, so that the hypertext documents could then be sent over the internet. I thought the companies engaged in the then fringe field of hypertext would immediately grasp the possibilities of the web. Unfortunately, their reaction was quite the opposite... it seemed that explaining the vision of the web was exceedingly difficult without a web browser in hand, people had to be able to grasp the web in full, which meant imagining a whole world populated with websites and browsers. It was a lot to ask. Despite the buy don't build credo I came to the conclusion that I was going to have to create the web on my own.