We are at CERN today to celebrate 30 years of the World Wide Web: ask us anything about the history of the Web, its future and everything in between!

I have two questions: I remember in early 90's that the World Wide Web was only one part of the Internet and in my mind and many of my peers, it had the least information at the time. I would use multiple applications in a Unix shell: gopher, archie, veronica, WAIS, FTP, newsgroups, mail, etc. but lynx had more of the "oh that's neat" factor than actual usefullness (apologies :-)). Did you all have any idea that the web would end up basically replacing all the other Internet-based protocols/services (WAIS, gopher, archie, etc.) and services? A lot of client-server applications these days often use HTTPS to transport data in the back-end even when the application has no web-based interface. When building the HTTP protocol, what were the primary considerations at the time (scalability, extensibility, performance, etc.) and was large scale security one of those initial considerations?

/r/IAmA Thread