Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955) is the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development.
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- Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.
- Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.
- in Technology Review, July 1996
- I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web.
- The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.
- in Weaving The Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web"
- I think in general it's clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings, and the Web's a form of communications, so it generally should be good.
- I don't believe in the sort of eureka moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time. And it wasn't that suddenly it came to him.
- Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.
- What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web … Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.
- When I invented the web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.
- Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
- Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy.
- The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.
- ...At CERN there was a credo meant to avoid unnecessary labors, it said that when acquiring new technology: Buy, Don't Build. There were several commercial hypertext editors and I thought we could just add some internet code, so that the hypertext documents could then be sent over the internet. I thought the companies engaged in the then fringe field of hypertext would immediately grasp the possibilities of the web. Unfortunately, their reaction was quite the opposite...it seemed that explaining the vision of the web was exceedingly difficult without a web browser in hand, people had to be able to grasp the web in full, which meant imagining a whole world populated with websites and browsers. It was a lot to ask. Despite the buy don't build credo I came to the conclusion that I was going to have to create the web on my own.
- From his book Weaving the Web 1999
- In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked hte idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.
- Weaving the Web, p. 14.
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- If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL or have to deal with HTML. That was a surprise to me - that people were prepared to painstakingly write HTML.
- Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.
- The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.
- The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.
- They may call it a home page, but it's more like the gnome in somebody's front yard than the home itself.
- Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.
- What is a Web year now, about three months? And when people can browse around, discover new things, and download them fast, when we all have agents - then Web years could slip by before human beings can notice.
- You affect the world by what you browse.
- I got into a lot of trouble when somebody called me "The Creator of the World Wide Web". I got an angry call from somebody who said that it was preposterous because I couldn't have written all that stuff.
- Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it's all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.
Quotes about Berners-Lee
- He is a great visionary, but not actually always that good at explaining it … He is very technical, and always happiest when talking to other techies. All he really wants to do is write code, but now he has to go and meet world leaders and business people. I don't think he realised what they were doing at CERN would change the world this much. I think this is as big, if not bigger, than the printing press.
