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Note: Many of these questions are now answered in much more depth in mybook,Weaving theWeb
I feel that after a while if I answer the same questions again, I willstart answering rather mechanically, and will forget important steps, andafter a while it won't make sense. So I have put a few answers from myoutgoing mail in this list to save everyone time. But this list is (c) TBL sodon't quote directly in the press without permission. Do feel free to quotefor school projects. If you are doing a school project, I have a specialpage of questions that people tend to ask for reports.Thanks.
Q: I'm updating my address book entries on (some site which shares contactinformation). Could you log on and update your address book, please? Then wecan keep in touch and easily track changes to each other's addresses.
A: No, I have aFOAF file. Doyou? Why should I have to get an account at every site which keeps a recordof me? That's not using the web. In fact I have that information on the webas data. A URI for me is
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i
That is available in RDF, the W3C standard for generic data interchange,as card.rdf, and also on Notation3 at card.n3. You can use programs like thetabulator or Foafnaut for reading FOAF files, and various sites index then invarious ways.
You will notice that my FOAF page has links to information about myorganization, whose URI is http://www.w3.org/data#W3C, and the pagehttp://www.w3.org/data has links to the W3C publications and organizationalstructure and so on.
If you are updating your address book, please take the time to publish aFOAF page. (PS: Plaxosays it supportsFOAF but I don't know how well) If you join the Opera community, orLiveJournal,you get a FOAF page automatically.
(2004) When I moved to MIT from CERN in 1994, it was to start the WorldWide Web Consortium and act as its Director. Since then, my time has beensplit between the various tasks that involves, and, once the W3C was runningsmoothly, also forward-looking research into the future of decentralizedsystems like the Web and specifically the Web of machine-processsable data,the "Semantic Web". In 2002, Steve Bratt joined W3C as Chief OperatingOfficer and in 2006 was named CEO, which made that part of my life mucheasier, and made W3C run very much more effectively. In 2004, I also accepteda part-time post at Southampton University in the UK. Southampton is one ofthe leading sites in Semantic Web research in the UK. While this will take afairly limited amount of my time, I hope it will help collaboration betweenMIT and Southampton, and it will allow me to help Southampton and MIT to planfuture research directions.
My roles as W3C Director and resarcher at CSAIL continue. With Steve inthe CEO position, I can emphasize the technical side of my work such as thatwith the W3C Technical Architecture Group.
This question is one I have started (2002/04) getting more and morefrequently. It is (ironically) normally sent automatically by people who areso enraged by spam (unsolicited bulk commercial email) that they try to findsome way to protest to someone who will be able to stop the spammers. Mostself-respecting Internet Service Providers will terminate their contract withanyone who abuses the service. So it is a reasonable to take that approach.So these people generally set up a program to check through the email to findthe web page it points to. Spammers are always after people's money, sothere is some pointer to a web site which will (indirectly) take it. The planis basically that these folk search the email message for pointers to websites, and then search the domain name information to find out who isresponsible for that domain. They then try to email someone "upstream" whowill cut off the spammer's email access.
If you are one of these people, and you end up mailing me (timbl@w3.org)it is probably because I am one of the contacts for www.w3.org. Why do youfind www.w3.org? Because you search the hypertext (HTML) email toosimplistically and you found the XML namespace identifier which defines theHTML language. This is a NOT a hypertext link. It identifies thespecification of the language in which the email is written. The identifierin www.w3.org space is there because the World Wide Web consortium is thebody which defines HTML. So w3.org has nothing to do with the sender of thespam. So if you vent your frustration on me, it just shows the software youare using is broken.
By the way, I don't know whether the technique works. I have a horriblefeeling that the spammers will just revel in the feedback they get from this.But I don't know. Check out abuse.net from which I have got some of these. Iamnot mad at you for trying to stop spam. I am mad at those whospammed you. For the record:
See also:
Q: I have been working for a long time on a very special and new ideawhich will revolutionize computing. Can I tell you about it?
A: This is the most difficult answer to have to write. I am sorry to saythat I can't give your vision of the future the time it would take to compareit with existing architectures and point out the similarities anddissimilarities. I get quite a few requests like this. What I would humblysuggest (and only suggest) is that you do that comparison piecemeal, and -while keeping your vision in mind -- try to find the first piece to implementin the move toward what you envisage. The world can only really be changedone piece at a time. The art is picking that piece.
When you have, then use the web to find out who is working in that area.Acquaint yourself with the vocabulary they use for talking about it. Find away of explaining your novel idea in their terms, after you have understoodwhy it has not already been done your way. Then suggest that change. If itis an idea in computing, then you may want to write the code to show that itworks first.
(I didn't find lots of people willing to get excited about the idea of theweb. They quite reasonably asked to know why it was different from the past,or other hypertext systems. In retrospect, it was mainly that thedecentralized database is removed, allowing the system to scale, but allowingfor dangling links. But it took a long time for that to surface as thenovelty.)
Q: What sort of technology should the forward-looking geeks in mycompany be looking at?
A: You probably have a lot of people using XML by now. You should havesomeone looking at the next level -RDF. Tell them notto worry about the syntax, but check out the model. This is a question oflooking the data your company is storing and transferring, and making surethat it can be represented in that simple circles-and-arrows RDF way. Thisis very simple. An important trick is that you use URIs to identify thearrows as well as the circles. Doing this homework will ensure that you havea well-defined data model, which will allow you data to be combined, mergedwith any other RDF-model data. It will mean you will be able to multiply thepower of separate application areas by running RDF queries and new RDF-basedapplications across both areas. It will mean that you will be there withtalent which understands the basic model as theSemantic Web becomes all-important.
Other things to watch:SVG - Scalable VectorGraphics - at last, graphics which can be rendered optimally on all sizesof device. The user interface world is rapidly becoming competent atvoice input and outputand W3C has standards in that areacoming along.XML Signature will let you todigitally sign XML documents - find out how. But in general, always check outtheW3C home page for what's new.
If your company/organization/self is a W3C member, then your AdvisoryCommittee representative has the task of understanding everything which ishappening in W3C, and everything in your company, and seeing where theyshould be introduced.
Q: What do you think about the peer-peer file sharing technology whichallows people to copy copyrighted information so easily?
A: The issue is not simple - so I try to put my thoughts into a few words.In general, the way to make a sane society is to enact and enforce lawsrather than to ban a given generic technology. (I would make the exceptionfor things which are specifically designed to harm such as guns and nuclearbombs.) That said, one can make technology which supports our social andlegal frameworks better if one does it deliberately. One of the four domainsof the World Wide Web Consortium addressesTechnology andSociety for this reason. For example, in this case, I think we reallyneed standards for encoding the broad licensing terms of material so it canbe read and handled automatically. Then we can see, when the technologyallows one to see whether information is free or for pay, whether there isstill a substantial problem of theft. The basic idea of forwarding copiesautomatically between machines is a technical optimization of thedistribution protocol which is very useful and should not of itself bedisallowed just because it -- like many powerful things -- can be abused. I'dpoint out that some ostensibly "peer-peer" systems are centralized system infact, allowing centralized control and profit by the central server's owners.Other systems are really decentralized, having no central server. These arelike internet news groups which have been around for ages and which raisedsimilar issues.
Q: What is your opinion on 'Cyber Squatting' for domain names? (-LiaKim)
A: Domain names are a scarce resource - one of the few scarce resources incyberspace. I have little sympathy for those who scoop these up with the hopeof speculating on their value. This is not one of the most helpful activitieson the net. There are those who use their energy for the purposes offurthering the technology or the content or the world in some way, but justsitting on a domain name without using it in order to cash in later does notseem to me to be constructive.
A: Sorry, not me! I was lucky enough to invent the Web at the time whenthe Internet already existed - and had for a decade and a half. If you arelooking for fathers of the Internet, tryVint Cerf andBob Kahn who defined the "Internet Protocol" (IP) by whichpackets are sent on from one computer to another until they reach theirdestination. See:
Vint explains the timing:
"The DESIGN of Internet was done in 1973 and published in 1974. There ensued about 10 years of hard work, resulting in the roll out of Internet in 1983. Prior to that, a number of demonstrations were made of the technology - such as the first three-network interconnection demonstrated in November 1977 linking SATNET, PRNET and ARPANET in a path leading from Menlo Park, CA to University College London and back to USC/ISI in Marina del Rey, CA."
David Clark, of MIT's LCS, is another one I can point to who put in thework in the 1970s which made the Web possible in the 1990s.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn used, in making IP, the concept of packet switchingwhich had been invented byPaul Barran.
It is also good to mention the Domain Name Service upon which the webrelies heavily. The protocols which make the DNS work were pioneered andstandardized byPaulMockapetris.
A: The Internet ('Net) is a network of networks. Basically it is made fromcomputers and cables. What Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn did was to figure out howthis could be used to send around little "packets" of information. As Vintpoints out, a packet is a bit like a postcard with a simple address on it. Ifyou put the right address on a packet, and gave it to any computer which isconnected as part of the Net, each computer would figure out which cable tosend it down next so that it would get to its destination. That's what theInternet does. It delivers packets - anywhere in the world, normally wellunder a second.
Lots of different sort of programs use the Internet: electronic mail, forexample, was around long before the global hypertext system I invented andcalled the World Wide Web ('Web). Now, videoconferencing and streamed audiochannels are among other things which, like the Web, encode information indifferent ways and use different languages between computers ("protocols") toprovide a service.
The Web is an abstract (imaginary) space of information. On the Net, youfind computers -- on the Web, you find document, sounds, videos,....information. On the Net, the connections are cables between computers; on theWeb, connections are hypertext links. The Web exists because of programswhich communicate between computers on the Net. The Web could not be withoutthe Net. The Web made the net useful because people are really interested ininformation (not to mention knowledge and wisdom!) and don't really want tohave know about computers and cables.
Questions below derived from those asked by Taiwan'sCommonwealthmagazine
FromA Short Personal History of the Web:
A: The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.
A: Not really. It was simply that had the technology been proprietary,and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decisionto make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. Youcan't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keepcontrol of it.
A: That is a big question. I am very happy at the incredible richness ofmaterial on the Web, and in the diversity of ways in which it is being used. There are many parts of the original dream which are not yet implemented. For example, very few people have an easy, intuitive tool for putting theirthoughts into hypertext. And many of the reasons for, and meaning of, linkson the web is lost. But these can, and I think will, change.
A: There has always been a huge competition to come out with the best Webtechnology. This has followed from the fact that the standards, being open,allow anyone to experiment with new extensions. This produces the threat offragmentation into many Webs, and that threat brings the companies to the W3Cto agree about how to go forward together. It is the tension of thiscompetition and the need for standards which drives W3C forward at such aspeed.
A: We should all learn to be information smart: to understand when a Website, or a piece of software, or an Internet Service provider plan, isgiving us biased information. We should learn to distinguish qualityinformation and quality links. As technology evolves, andmachine-understandable information on the Web becomes available, we should beaware of the sudden changes which large-scale machine processing might haveon our businesses.
A: Nothing can be perfect, but the Web could be a lot better. It wouldhelp if we had easy hypertext editors which let us make links betweendocuments with the mouse. It would help if everyone with Web access also hadsome space they can write to -- and that is changing nowadays as a lot ofISPs give web space to users. It would help if we had an easy way ofcontrolling access to files on the web so that we could safely use it forprivate, group, or family information without fear of the wrong people beingable to access it.
Q: You talked about the need for a metadata language. Can you tell uslaymen what it is?
A: "Meta" is used with anything which is about itself - so a metabookwould be a book about books, and metadata is data about data. On the Web,this means all sorts of information about information: its ownership,authorship, distribution rights, privacy policy, and so on. These needs aredriving us to make ways of putting information on the web designed forcomputers to be able to understand. Web pages at the moment in HTML aredesigned to be read by humans. In the future, some Web pages will be in "RDF"-- Resource Description Framework. This will be read by computer programswhich will help us organize ourselves and our data and possibly everything wedo.
Q: Are you worried about privacy on the Web?
A: When it comes to privacy, my personal view is that the consumer needssome legal or regulatory protection by default. The W3C has a project called"P3P" for privacy which will allow a user to control if and how informationis given away to a Web server. P3P will allow Web sites to specify theirprivacy policy and users to automatically be warned about sites whosepolicies they don't like. See theP3Pproject.
Q. Do you shop online? What do you think about the E-Commerce?
A: Yes, I buy a lot of things online myself. I think that Web shopping asit is is only the tip of a huge larger change which will come when I can findthings and compare prices automatically, and when electronic financialinstruments are commonplace.
Q: Peter Drucker has predicted that information technology will bringabout the demise of the university as currently constituted. Do you sharethis view? What changes will the Web help bring to education?
A: I hope that educators will pool their resources and create a hugesupply of online materials. I hope much of this will be available freely tothose especially in developing countries who may not have access to it anyother way. Then I think we will see two things. One will be that keepingthat web of material up to date will take a lot of time and effort - it willseem like more effort than creating it in the first place. The other is thatwe will see how essential people, and their wisdom, and their personalinteractions, are to the educational process. A university is a lot morethan its library.
Q: How do you see the web shape the new, knowledge-basedeconomy?
A: The Web is simply a name for all the information you can get online. Soit will be the abstract place where the knowledge-based economy happens. Already the W3C staff team works with three international sites, manyoffices, and several people working from or near home. The Web will open upnew forms of business altogether, and make us rethink the way we run existingbusinesses. It can turn bureaucracy over to machines, and let people get onwith the creativity. It will help us see where we each fit, with our ownexperience, talents and passions, among the millions of other people andtheirs. It can help us work together more effectively, removemisunderstanding, and bring about peace and harmony on a global scale. Butit can only do these things is we learn to use it wisely, and we think verycarefully about both the technology and the laws we make or change aroundit.
Q: What was the first web page?
A: Apart from local "file:" URLs on my machine (which was the firstbrowser as well as the first server), the first http one (end of 1990) wasbasically
http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
An alias was made so that this was later known as
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
It is not now (alas) served but a later (1992) copy of the original pagesexists athttp://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Q: Do you have any examples of the early Web which we could comparewith the current Web?
A: (1997): I don't have a very early 1990,91 snapshot but there is asnapshot of our web as of November 1992, much of which dates from earlier.(For some reason Netscape 3.0 doesn't display the old HTML in some pages, or perhaps it just has a bug. They dowork with Internet Explorer 4.0)
There is alistof design issues and atripreport on the 1990 European Conference on HyperText and anoteon the "state of standardization"(!) and an example of the use of theweb as a collaborative tool in somesharednotes on the topology of the web I wrote and Jean-Francois Groffannotated .
The pages will look much the same as they did originally, although theactual style sheet I used as a default with the original browser/editor youcan see converted approximately into a CSS style sheet if you read myStyle Guide for Online Hypertextwith a CSS-compliant browser such as IE 4.0.
Some of the links in the historical stuff have been accidentally saved(much later) incorrect absolute links -- if you really want to follow themyou can see where they ought to have gone by stripping of the prefix.
(Based on replies to David Brake, "New Scientist",1997/9)
Q: Why did you study physics?
A (1997) : My parents are both mathematicians: they actually met whileworking on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. Mymother has been dubbed the "first commercial computer programmer" as she wentwith the machine when it was installed on the customer site. So we playedwith 5 hole paper tape, and learned to enjoy mathematics wherever it croppedup, and learned that it cropped up everywhere.
Later on, my hobby was electronics. When I left school, obviously I wasgoing to do something in maths, science and/or engineering. Emanuel schoolwas programmed to send people to Oxford, where the subjects are very narrow.I took physics thinking it would be a sort of compromise between maths andelectronics, theory and practice. It turned out not to be that, but to besomething special and wonderful in itself. Physics was fun, and in fact agood preparation for creating a global system. In physics, you learn to thinkup some simple mathematical rule on a microscopic scale, which when scaledwill explain the macroscopic behavior. On the Internet, we try to dream upcomputer protocols which when extrapolated to the macroscopic will produce aninformation space with properties we would like.
Q: Why didn't you stay on to do a PhD in physics?
A: After undergraduate physics, you have a reasonable training in logicalthought and common sense, an ounce of philosophy and not enough maths tostudy physics. I didn't meet anyone who was actually doing physics researchat the postgrad level and was really excited about it. I might have been moretempted to take a PhD if I had had a role model who did have thatexcitement.
What seemed much more exciting was the possibility of that electronichobby really taking off. The microprocessor was just hitting the world. I gotan early M6800 evaluation kit, and built myself a rack-based 8-bit system. Ihad already while in college slowly put together a display unit out of an oldTV, bits of TTL logic and junk from the Tottenham Court Road. I joinedPlessey Data Systems: of the telecom companies doing the "milk round"interviews the Poole (Dorset) site won hands down in terms of the sea and thecountryside!
Those who got into designing microprocessor hardware and software thenrode the crest of the wave of the deployment of microprocessor technology.Compared with TTL, a microprocessor gave one that feeling of unboundedopportunity which had everyone excited. Later, the thought of building anabstract information space on top of it all had the same sort of kick.
Q: What role does theW3C play insetting standards?
A: (1996) W3C's mission is to realize the full potential of the web, bybringing its members and others together in a neutral forum. The W3C has tomove rapidly (time measured in "web years" = 2.6 months) so it cannot affordto have a traditional Standards process. What has happened to date has beenthat W3C has, by providing a neutral forum and facilitation, and also withthe help of its technically astute staff, got a consensus among thedevelopers about a way to go. Then, this has been all that has been needed:once a common specification has been prepared and a general consensus amongthe experts is seen, companies have been running with that ball. Thespecifications have become de facto standards. This has happened with forexample HTML TABLES, and PICS. Now in fact we have decided to start using nota full standards process, but a process of formal review by the W3Cmembership, in order to draw attention to specifications, and to cement theirstatus a little. After review by members, the specifications will be known asW3C process.
(Seeprocess of review)
Q:What do you make of the branding attempt of companies, by puttinglittle icons on their home pages saying, "best when viewed with MicrosoftExplorer, or Navigator?"
A: This comes from an anxiousness to use the latest proprietary featureswhich have not been agreed by all companies. It is done either by those whohave an interest in pushing a particular company, or it is done by those whoare anxious to take the community back to the dark ages of computing when afloppy from a PC wouldn't read on a Mac, and a Wordstar document wouldn'tread in Word Perfect, or an EBCDIC file wouldn't read on an ASCII machine.It's fine for individuals whose work is going to be transient and who aren'tworried about being read by anyone.
However, corporate IT strategists should think very carefully aboutcommitting to the use of features which will bind them into the control ofany one company. The web has exploded because it is open. It has developed sorapidly because the creative forces of thousands of companies are building onthe same platform. Binding oneself to one company means one is limiting one'sfuture to the innovations that one company can provide.
Q: What role do standards play in today's hyper competitive, andfast-changing marketplace?
A: Common specifications are essential. This competition, which is a greatforce toward innovation, would not be happening if it were not building on abase of HTTP, URL and HTML standards. These forces are strong. They are theforces which, by their threat to tear the web apart into fragmentedincompatible pieces, force companies toward common specifications.
Q:Is it overly ambitious to think standards can be set and adhered to?Are they a relic of a kinder, gentler era?
A: Do you think that incompatibility, the impossibility of transferringinformation between different machines, companies, operating systems,applications, was "kinder, gentler"? It was a harsh, frustrating era. The Webhas brought a kindness and gentleness for users, a confidence in technologywhich is a balm for IT departments everywhere. It has bought new hope. As aresult, great things are happening very fast. So this is a faster, moreexciting era.
Companies know that it is only interesting to compete over one featureuntil everyone can do it. After that, that feature becomes part of the base,and everyone wants to do it in one, standard, way. The smart companies arecompeting on the implementations: the many other aspects such asfunctionality, speed, ease of use and support which differentiateproducts.
June 96Q:What sort of computer do you use?
A: (2002) A titanium G4 Powerbook running OS X and under X11 fink-installed stuff including Amaya. I use a Nokia bluetooth 3670 tri-band GSMphone which has a low-res camera. The OS X operating system is very similarto the NeXTStep operating system on which I developed the WorldWideWebprogram originally.
Robert Cailliau also worked at CERN, in a different division from me.He was the first convert to the web technology after Mike Sendall whooriginally let me start the project.
Robert put in huge amounts of time and effort into the WWWproject.He tried to get official funding for it from CERN.He looked for students who might be interested in working on it, and found several, some of whom, like Henrik Frystyk Nielsen andAri Luotonen, became famous names in later WWW history.He would organize the details with management, and I wouldtechnically supervise, though our offices were several minutes walkaway across the site.(If CERN had not been an international site, mine would have been on French soil and his on Swiss,so we would have had to show our passports each time!)
Some commentators suggest that Robert co-invented the WWW.To set this straight, he did not invent it.It wasn't his idea.He did not write the specifications for UDIs (later to be URLs, then URIs),or for HTML, the hypertext language, nor HTTP, the protocol, or the codeof the original implementation.More than a year after my original proposal (March 1989), while I wasworking on the code, he wrote a proposal to CERN proposing some staff beallocated to the project.This was a brave thing to do, as CERN wasalways chronically short of manpower for the huge challenges it had taken on.So Robert put himself out there to claim that effort on WWW was worth it.
He pushed CERN's management, also, for them to give the WWW technology awaywithout royalties. This took 18 months, and a lot of nagging at the directorate level.This was hugely important for the future of the WWW.
One cannot catalog in one place all the many many things Robert has done for the Web.One thing which stands out was his organizing of the first WWW conference, at CERN,after a short tussle with NCSA as to who should hold the first.Since then Robert was for many years intimately involved wit the InternationalWWW Conference series.
That's not to say either that Robert did not have a technical side.His negotiating for internet access from a local university, and soldering upof the modem so that we could demonstrate the WWW at theHypertext conference in San Antonio was a great illustration of his spirit.He also later wrote a browser for the Mac, his favorite platform.(Robert had passion for user interfaces which people could actually use,and so the Mac and the Web both appealed). The browser, called Samba,was an attempt to port the design of the original WWW browser,which I wrote on the NeXT machine,onto the Mac platform, but was not ready before NCSA brought out the Mac version of Mosaic, which eclipsed it.
Robert continued to speak on the subject of the web, promoting it,explaining it, and defending it, for many years, and still does, though hehas retired from CERN and the conference committee.The early days of the web were very hand-to-mouth.So many things to do, such a delicate flame to kep alive.Without Robert's energy and passion for it I cannot imagine that it could have taken off as it did.
I wrote the proposal, and developed the code in CERN Building 31.I was on the second (in the european sense) floor, if you come out of the elevator(a very slow freight elevator at the time anyway) and turn immediately right you would then walk into one of the two offices I inhabited.The two offices (which of course may have been rearranged since then)were different sizes: the one to the left (a gentle R turn out of the elevator)benefitted from extra length as it was by neither staircase nor elevator.The one to the right (or a sharp R turn out of the elevator) was shorterand the one I started in. I shared it for a long time with Claude Bizeau.I think I wrote the 1989 memo there.
When I actually started work coding up the WWW code in September1990, I moved into the larger office. That is where I had the NeXT machine,as I remember it.
The second floor had pale grey linoleum, the first floor, where Peggie Rimmer had her office, had red lino; the third floor had pale yellow lino. The ground floor had I think green lino.Also on the second floor was the Documentation et Données, later Computing and Networking, HQ with David Williams at one point heading it up.
Q: How in fact do you spell World Wide Web?
A: It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym isthree separate "W"s. There are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in someplaces been spelled with a hyphen but the official way is without. Yes, Iknow that "worldwide" is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web isthree words.
I use "Web" with a capital W to indicate that it is an abbreviation for"World Wide Web". Hence, "What a tangled web he wove on his Web site!".
Often, WWW is written and read as W3, which is quicker to say. Inparticular, the World Wide Web consortium is W3C,never WWWC.
Q: Why did you call it WWW?
A: Looking for a name for a global hypertext system, an essential elementI wanted to stress was its decentralized form allowing anything to link toanything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed tobe global of course. (I had noticed that projects find it useful to have asignature letter, as the Zebra project at CERN which started all itsvariables with "Z". In fact by the time I had decided on WWW, I had writtenenough code using global variables starting with "HT" for hypertext that Wwasn't used for that.). Alternatives I considered were "Mine of information"("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste) and "The Information Mine ("Tim", even moreegocentric!), and "Information Mesh" (too like "Mess" though its ability todescribe a mess was a requirement!). Karen Sollins at MIT now has a Meshproject.
(2000/09) When I was designing the Web, I tried to use forms which peoplewould recognize from elsewhere.
Q: What is the history of the //?
A: I wanted the syntax of the URI to separate the bit which the webbrowser has to know about (www.example.com) from the rest (the opaque stringwhich is blindly requested by the client from the server). Within the rest ofthe URI, slashes (/) were the clear choice to separate parts of ahierarchical system, and I wanted to be able to make a link without having toknow the name of the service (www.example.com) which was publishing the data.The relative URI syntax is just unix pathname syntax reused without apology.Anyone who had used unix would find it quite obvious. Then I needed anextension to add the service name (hostname). In fact this was similar to theproblem the Apollo domain system had had when they created a network filesystem. They had extended the filename syntax to allow//computername/file/path/as/usual. So I just copied Apollo. Apollo was abrand of unix workstation. (The Apollo folks, who invented domain andApollo's Remote procedure call system later I think went largely toMicrosoft, and rumor has it that much of Microsoft's RPC system was).
I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy. I would likehttp://www.example.com/foo/bar/baz to be just writtenhttp:com/example/foo/bar/baz where the client would figure out thatwww.example.com existed and was the server to contact. But it is too latenow. It turned out the shorthand "//www.example.com/foo/bar/baz" is rarelyused and so we could dispense with the "//".
Q: What about the "#"?
A: So, I needed something to separate the document (resource) from thething (fragment) within that document (or view of that document). In a snailmail address in the US at least, it is common to use the number sign for anapartment number or suite number within a building. So 12 Acacia Av #12 means"The building at 12 Acacia Av, and then within that the unit known numbered12". It seemed to be a natural character for the task. Now,http://www.example.com/foo#bar means "Within resourcehttp://www.example.com/foo, the particular view of it known as bar".
It turned out later that in fact another hypertext project of some sort inIBM, and Doug Englebart's NLS system had both independently use "#" for thispurpose. So there is something to choosing a character for the way peoplethink of it.
Ray Tomlinson, who invented email, tells a similar story of many yearsearlier choosing the "@" for email - it made linguistic sense, as "at" wasthe english preposition which typically connects a person and their address.Hence ray@example.com and so on.
A: I wrote in 1990 the first GUI browser, and called it"WorldWideWeb". It ran on the NeXT computer. (I much later renamed theapplicationNexus to avoid confusion between the first client and theabstract space itself).
WorldWideWeb was a graphical point-and-click browser with mode-freeediting and link creation. It used style sheets, and multiple fonts, sizes,and justification styles. It would download and display linked images,diagrams, sounds animations and movies from anything in the large NeXTStepstandard repertoire.
(Some have asked for pointers to the source code. I have found anarchive directory includingtheHyperText.mmodule which was the basis for the hypertext functionality. This code, likeall my WWW code and later W3C has always been publicly available. Thisarchive has the code, though the libwww code modules are soft links which nolonger work. I haven't tried recompiling and linking it for years - so it isprobably of historical interest only)
Pei Wei, student at U.C. Berkeley (not Stanford, as incorrectly reportedearlier in a typo here), then wroteViolaWWW for unix, based on hisViola language; some students at Helsinki University of Technologywrote "Erwise" for unix; and Tony Johnson of SLAC wrote "Midas" for unix. PeiWei has passed though history unnoticed among others whose work is notmentioned in the histories, even though there was a year or so when Viola wasthe best way to browse the web, was the engine driving the installation ofnew servers, and the recommended browser at CERN for example.
Many people, incidentally, saw the Web for the first time by telnettingintoinfo.CERN.ch, which gave them a crude but functional line modeinterface. This was the second browser, a text-based browser, called the"line mode" browser, or "www", and written by CERN student Nicola Pellow.Many people imagined that that was all there was to the web. As onejournalist wrote "The Web is a way of finding information by typing numbers"as links were numbered on the page. It was only in the community of peoplewho use NeXT computers that the Web could be seen as a point-and-click spaceof hypertext.
A: As I understand it, Marc Andreessen at NCSA was shown ViolaWWW by acolleague (David Thompson?) at NCSA. Marc downloaded Midas and tried it out.He and Eric Bina then wrote their own browser for unix from scratch. Later,several other folks at NCSA joined the team to port the idea to Mac and PC.As they did, Tom Bruce at Cornell was writing "Cello" for the PC which cameout neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.
Marc and Eric did a number of very important things. They made a browserwhich was easy to install and use. They were the first one to get inlineimages working - to that point browsers had had varieties of fonts andcolors, but pictures were displayed in separate windows. This made web pagesmuch sexier. Most importantly, Marc followed up his and Eric's coding withvery fast 24hr customer support, really addressing what it took to make theapp easy and natural to use, and trivial to install. Other apps had otherthings going for them. Viola, for example, was more advanced in many ways,with downloaded applets and animations way back then - very like HotJava waslater. But Mosaic was the easiest step onto the Web for a beginner, and sowas a critical element of the Web explosion.
Marc marketed Mosaic hard on the net, and NCSA hard elsewhere, trying hardto brand the WWW and "Mosaic": "I saw it on Mosaic" etc. When Marc and JimClark first started their start-up they first capitalized on the Mosaicbrand, but NCSA fought for it and won. When the "Netscape" brand appeared,people realized the difference between the general "World Wide Web"conceptand specific software.
Q. Have your first ideas in regard to the Web been influenced by anyspecific work or published paper like Vanevar Bush's "As we my think",a publication of Doug Engelbart or Ted Nelson?
A. There wasn't a direct line. I did come across Ted's work while I wasworking on the WWW -- after my "Enquire" program (1980) but during my readingup on hypertext - probably between March 89 and September 1990. Not sure.. Ofcourse by 1989 there was hypertext as a common word, hypertext helpeverywhere, so Ted's basic idea had been (sort of) implemented and I cameacross it though many indirect routes.
I came across Ted's name first of course. Then I ordered "LiteraryMachines", and I remember I was late paying him as he didn't take creditcards or Swiss cheques - I paid him in August 1992, in cash, in person inSausolito.
I came across Vannevar Bush's article first in the documentation ofDigital Equipment Corporation's "Memex" project which became "Linkworks" forVMS. I don't remember when that came out. Great paper.
Doug Englebart's work was the closest to the Web design -- when I saw thatthe first time I was amazed. He had even used the hash sign as a delimiterfor the address within a document (I guess like me by analogy with anapartment number). Doug's stuff is unbelievable. You have best to see thevideo of him demonstrating it or his demo of a recent smalltalkre-implementation. I saw the latter at the Edinburg Hypertext conference ECHT94.
Q: Any people who personally helped you get to where you aretoday?
A: I think the list would be too long to mention. Everyone who was fun andencouraging, starting with my parents. On the professional side, here are afew:
The Maths teacher at Emanuel, Frank Grundy, who conveyed the excitement ofthe subject with a twinkle of his eye, could make numerical approximations inhis head faster than we could work it out longhand, and would throw in ateaser question into his conversation to puzzle anyone who thought they hadfigured the subject out. And Daffy Pennel who also couldn't contain hisexcitement for Chemistry and anything related to it.
Unlike most people at Oxford I had one tutor for almost all the work. JohnMoffat has a vary rare talent for being able to understand not only thephysics itself, but also my tangled misguided attempts at it, and thenshowing me in my terms using my strange symbols and vocabulary where I hadgone wrong. Many people can only explain the world from their own point ofview.
At CERN, I was recruited by Peggie Rimmer who taught me, among otherthings, how to write a standards document. Ben Segal was a mentor for my RPCproject at CERN, and was a sole evangelist for Internet protocols at CERNlong before they were adopted. Ben gave me a lot of moral support in thelater WWW days too. A few years later, Mike Sendall was my boss who has agreat combination of human warmth and technical depth, and actually allowedme unofficially to write the WWW programs. And then everyone across theInternet who thought the Web was a neat idea and worked on it after hoursactually built it.
The web today is a medium for communication between people, usingcomputers as a largely invisible part of the infrastructure. One of thelong-term goals of the consortium is "Automatability", the ability forcomputers to make some sense of the information and so help us in our task.It has been the goal of mankind for so long that machines should help us inmore useful ways than they do at present, help us solve some of those humanproblems. Maybe this is one of the many ideas (like hypertext) which theweb's great scale will allow to work where it did not achieve critical masson a small scale before. So there are groups looking at a web of knowledgerepresentation. It could be that some scientific field will be the first tobe sufficiently disciplined to input its data not just as cool hypertext, butin a machine-readable form, allowing programs to wander the globe analyzingand surmising.
The W3 Consortium started to address this goal with its recent workshop onCollaboration on the Web. The ability of machines to process data on the webfor scientific purposes such as checking a scientist's private experimentaldata against public databases, require databases to be available not only ina raw machine-readable form, but also labelled in a machine readable way asto what they are.
The knowledge engineering field has to learn how to be global, and the webhas to learn knowledge engineering, but in the end this might be a way inwhich again the scientific field leads the world into something verypowerful, and a new paradigm shift.
Q: How did you come to arrive at the idea of WWW?
A: I arrived at the web because the "Enquire" (E not I) program -- shortfor Enquire Within Upon Everything, named after a Victorian book of that namefull of all sorts of useful advice about anything -- was something I foundreally useful for keeping track of all the random associations one comesacross in Real Life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering butsometimes mine wouldn't. It was very simple but could track thoseassociations which would sometimes develop into structure as ideas becameconnected, and different projects become involved with each other.
I was using Enquire myself, and realized that (a) it would fulfill myobligation to the world to describe what I was doing if everyone else couldget at the data, and (b) it would make it possible for me to check out theother projects in the lab which I could chose to use or not if only theirdesigners had used Enquire and I had access.
Now, the first version of Enquire allowed you to make links between files(on one file system) just as easily as between nodes within one file. (Itstored many nodes in one database file). The second version, a port from NORDto PC then VMS, would not allow external links.
This proved to be a debilitating problem. To be constrained into databaseenclosures was too boring, not powerful enough. The whole point abouthypertext was that (unlike most project management and documentation systems)it could model a changing morass of relationships which characterized mostreal environments I knew (and certainly CERN). Only allowing links withindistinct boxes killed that. One had to be able to jump from softwaredocumentation to a list of people to a phone book to an organizational chartto whatever .. as you can with the web today. The test rule was that if Ipersuaded two other projects to use it, and they described their systems withit, and then later at any point a module, person etc., in one project usedsomething from another project, that you would be able to add the link andthe two webs would become one with no global change -- no "flag day"involving the merging of two databases into one, no scaling problems as thenumber of connected things grew. Hence the W3 design.
The same lesson applies now to the webs of trust we will be building withlinked certificates.
So the requirement was for "external" links to be just as easy to make as"internal" links. Which meant that links had to be one way.
(There was also a requirement that the web should be really easy to addlinks to, but though that was true in the prototype we are only now startingto see betas of good commercial web editors now.)
This was an interview in Internet world by Kris Herbst. His questions arehis (c) of course. Slightly edited.
IW: What did you think of the first WWW'94 conference?
TBL: Great! It had a unique atmosphere, as there were people from all
walks of life brought together by their excitement about the Web. As it
was the first one, they hadn't met before, so it was a bit unique. It was
very oversubscribed, as you know, so the next one will have to be a lot
bigger.
IW: Can you tell us something about your early life, and how those
experiences might have influenced you later as you developed WWW?
TBL: That's the first time I've been asked to trace WWW history back
that far! I was born in London, England. My parents met while
developing the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially,
and I grew up playing with five-hole paper tape and building
computers out of cardboard boxes. Could that have been an influence?
Later on I studied physics as a kind of compromise between
mathematics and engineering. As it turned out, it wasn't that
compromise, but it was something special in its own right. Nevertheless,
afterward I went straight into the IT industry where more things
seemed to be happening. So I can't really call myself a physicist.
But physicists spend a lot of time trying to relate macroscopic behavior
of systems to microscopic laws, and that is the essence of the design of
scalable systems. So physics was probably an influence.
IW: What led you to conceive the WWW?
TBL: I dabbled with a number of programs representing information in
a brain-like way. Some of the earlier programs were too abstract and led
to hopelessly undebuggable tangles. One more practical program was a
hypertext notebook I made for my own personal use when I arrived at
CERN. I found I needed it just to keep track of the -- how shall I say --
flexible? creative? -- way new parts of the system, people and modules
were added on and connected together. The project I'd worked on just
before starting WWW was a real-time remote procedure call, so that
gave me some networking background. Image Computer Systems did a
lot of work with text processing and communications -- I was a director
before coming to CERN.
IW: What elements in your background or character helped you to
conceive WWW as a way to keep track of what was happening at
CERN?
TBL: Elements of character?! 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. The former two
probably helped. I think they are called Attention Deficiency Disorder
now. ;-)
IW: Do you have some favorite Web sites for browsing?
TBL: (Sigh) I wish I did, but I hardly spend any time browsing.
Historically, I appreciate the people who were first and showed others
how things could be -- Franz Hoesel's Vatican Library, of course, Steve
Putz's map server, lots more.
IW: How do you feel about the fact that WWW promises to generate
large amounts of money for some persons?
TBL: If it's good, people will want to buy it, and money is they way
they vote on what they want. I believe that system is the best one we
have, so if it's right, sure people are going to make money. People will
make money building software, selling information, and more
importantly doing all kinds of "real" business, which happens to work
much better because the Web is there to make their work easier.
The web is like paper. It doesn't constrain what you use it for:
you have to be able to use it for all of the information flow of
normal life.
My priority is to see it develop and evolve in a
way which will hold us in good stead for a long future.
If I, and CERN, hadn't had that attitude,
there probably wouldn't be a web now.
Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes
proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would
make me unhappy.
Q: I'm a student of visual communications and asked myself why linksare blue. I found some answers that might be, for example blue is a color oflearning, but I'm not sure what is right. Is there any reason, why links arecolored blue ?
A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links:it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote forthe NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasisform which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers wentcolor - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change thedefaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of coursewithCSS style sheets. Thereare many examples of style sheets which use different colors.
My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibilityleast. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature andbecause it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon inmany colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.
One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser whichhad a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the linkwith a square apparently raised area.
Q: I get on my connection screen something like
Keyword Decimal Description References
------- ------- ----------- ----------
http 80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP
http 80/udp World Wide Web HTTP
www 80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP
www 80/udp World Wide Web HTTP www-http
80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP www-http
80/udp World Wide Web HTTP # Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@W3.org>
Who are you and why are you there?
A: Your screen is showing you a list of services on the Internet. Service80, for example, is HTTP, the protocol which allows a web server and clientto talk to each other. A web client opens a TCP connection to a port number80 on the server. It just happened that I designed HTTP and asked for theport number to be assigned for computers everywhere to be able to use for theweb. So someone left my name and email against the entry at the time for therecord. The hash (#) tells your computer not to take any notice of that line.It is just historical. I am not hacking your computer!
A: No, I can't - sorry. I like to keep work and personal life separate.What is on the web on this page and my home page is all there is. Please donot email me asking for more information for school projects, etc. Thank youfor your understanding.
