Much of the thinking that drives TiddlyWeb has historical antecedents in the writing, thinking and research of Doug Engelbart.
Engelbart is generally remembered for being the inventor of the mouse but he has done much more: He orchestrated the mother of all demos which showed off precursors for pretty much everything we think of as modern computing.
Engelbart was convinced that human intellect could be augmented with proper training and tools. He believed augmentation was necessary to ensure the continued survival and success of the species in the face of increasingly complex problems, especially so-called wicked problems.
Engelbart's augmentation was built around tools used to enhance our ability to create, access and use information. These tools were especially important in enhancing what he eventually called 'C' activities:
- A: The things you do as the core goal: Make widgets.
- B: The things you do to get better at A.
- C: The things you do to get better at B.
When developers get together to talk about software development techniques, they are having a sort of 'B' activity. They are meeting to share information about how they do what they do, so they can get better at it. If they also talk about how useful these gatherings are, "how come we don't do them more often" and "how can we make them better" then they are also having something of 'C' activity.
At an abstract level 'C' activities can be described as getting better at using information. Getting better at using information means bootstrapping ourselves with tools that not only allow us to use information better but also think about the creation of still better information tools.
Innovation, at its core, can be described as new ways of using and understanding information: Exposure to information and juxtaposition of information breeds new thought.
New understandings of information come from making comparisons.
To compare things we must be able to access them and if that access is to be efficient we must be able to access at a granular level. The things being accessed must be small and identified at that small level. We don't point people at a book of the bible, we point them at chapter and verse.
In TiddlyWiki speak, the tiddler is the granular piece. To make it truly accessible, to make it //useful// information we must give it a URI. We must make it a first class resource on the web. That's what TiddlyWeb does.