Are you a Markov chain? The state of the art has advanced a long way if so. Nevertheless I don't understand the point you're trying to make, except that you seem to doubt that what Tim Berners-Lee (not 'Berner') did was actually innovative.
Important innovation often comes from someone making a trivial-seeming connection between two existant but separate concepts. For better or worse, the person who makes the minor leap often gets the major credit, with little acknowledgement for those who did all the groundwork on the separate bits (but lacked the spark to join them together.) It's the creation of something novel - the linkage - that's innovative. It can be obvious in hindsight; it usually is, in fact, but it takes a certain brain to see the connection in the first place.
The world needs people who can contribute flashes of novelty, just as it needs people willing to toil for years refining, strengthening and otherwise enhancing the foundations that those flashes can dance across. In their lives, people do both all the time to various degrees. A very few, like TBL, start something truly enormous through accident of circumstance.
In 1991, hypertext wasn't new, the internet wasn't new, and network file servers weren't new; but the combination of the three to create a user-navigable web of documents independent of the underlying network was most assuredly new. In such leaps and connections the world advances.
"NARRATOR: Sir John Maddox, later editor of Nature for two decades, shows how Franklin's contribution was obscured by Watson and Crick with a single guarded sentence.
SIR JOHN MADDOX: They say, "We have been stimulated by a general knowledge of her work." But in fact, they had particular knowledge of her work. And I, as an editor, would have smelled a rat at that."
Important innovation often comes from someone making a trivial-seeming connection between two existant but separate concepts. For better or worse, the person who makes the minor leap often gets the major credit, with little acknowledgement for those who did all the groundwork on the separate bits (but lacked the spark to join them together.) It's the creation of something novel - the linkage - that's innovative. It can be obvious in hindsight; it usually is, in fact, but it takes a certain brain to see the connection in the first place.
The world needs people who can contribute flashes of novelty, just as it needs people willing to toil for years refining, strengthening and otherwise enhancing the foundations that those flashes can dance across. In their lives, people do both all the time to various degrees. A very few, like TBL, start something truly enormous through accident of circumstance.
In 1991, hypertext wasn't new, the internet wasn't new, and network file servers weren't new; but the combination of the three to create a user-navigable web of documents independent of the underlying network was most assuredly new. In such leaps and connections the world advances.