The world-wide web wasn't a "fairly obvious" idea at all. It only seems so in hindsight. Private networks are one thing, but a shared space offering a common, open way to host, publish, view and locate content that the entire world can participate it ?
Sure, eventually it could have happened but it may not have happened for several decades.
I'm am no history buff but several decades seems way off. A lot of the pieces were already there: addressing (FTP), hyperlink (hypertext), multi media documents, world wide network, ... IMO his contribution is the overall architecture.
Hypertext existed. Plan files existed. FTP already existed.
In fact, the only surprising feature of www is that no one bothered to include bidirectional linking, to disastrous consequence.