The most important thing that was new was the idea of URI-or URL, that any piece of information anywhere should have an identifier, which will allow you to get hold of it.

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA (born 8 June 1955) also known as "TimBL" is a British computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989 and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid November.