Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee on November 18, 2005.
Born	Timothy Berners-Lee (1955-06-08) 8 June 1955 London, UK
Other names	Tim
Education	The Queen's College, Oxford
Occupation	Computer Scientist
Employer(s)	World Wide Web Consortium and University of Southampton
Known for	Inventing the World Wide Web
Title	Senior Researcher
Spouse	Nancy Carlson (remarried)
Children	2
Parent(s)	Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods
Website	Tim Berners-Lee
Notes
Holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA (born 8 June 1955) is an English computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web. On 25 December 1990 he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student staff at CERN. He was ranked Joint First alongside Albert Hofmann in The Telegraphs list of 100 greatest living geniuses. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development, the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and he is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

WHAT A SISSY

Work

Inventing the World Wide Web

This NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee at CERN and became the world's first Web server.

While an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE. After leaving CERN, in 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd in Bournemouth but returned to CERN in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web." He wrote his initial proposal in March 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor (WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system) and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).

The first Web site built was at CERN and was first put online on 6 August 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser and how to set up a Web server. It was also the world's first Web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other Web sites apart from his own.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.

Criticising Domain Extensions

In the past, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has vehemently opposed the addition of new tier domain names like ‘.xxx’ and ‘.mobi’. In fact, when the ‘.mobi’ came into existence, he was the biggest dissenter. He argues that everyone should be able to access the same web, irrespective of whether it is from a computer or a mobile phone.

"We have spoken about the mobile Web and how different people would be accessing the Web at different times and on different devices, a very great diversity. You have a screen with 3 million pixels one moment and would have a 3 inch screen the next moment. But it is important that if I refer to something like a train timetable for example and if I bookmark it using my phone, I can view it on my computer screen. Hence, it very important that the same URI works on different devices.

The problem with .mobi, I didn’t want to have a domain that limited accessibility from certain devices, small devices in this regard. Then this would mean that, there would be a different URI for the computer and mobile devices. I fail to understand the need for it. The important thing is that the same URI should work, I don’t want to keep track of two URI for same thing, and I do not want to keep two bookmarks of same thing, depending on whether I am using my computer or my mobile device. It is very pragmatical engineering reason.

The engineering of the Web depends on you have a general one URI for something and wherever you use it, it works, irrespective of the software or the hardware you are using. That is part of the universitality of the Web. I think the consortium behind .mobi have the best intention because they are trying to -- and we are working closely with them -- see a lot of content available from mobile devices. But architecturally I feel that .mobi is a gimmick, the same URI should work very well on different devices."

There has also been an ongoing tussle between different government bodies and ICANN on the ownership of the domain names, especially ".com". Berners-Lee supports the contention that no body should own the domain names, as they constitute a public resource.

"The roots of the domain names should not be owned, it is a public domain resource and it should be managed very carefully for the people of the world. There is a lot of management that has to be done for the domain names and it has to be done carefully. As you know I am not in favor of creating just top-level domain left, right and center. I think the Internet can happily survive for the next ten years without the need of a new top-level domain. I think most of the time people are doing this not because they think it will help the society but because they can own a whole lot of Internet real estate. For instance I don’t think that the .info domain has really helped as very much, people still feel they should get a .com and it only adds to the confusion if different companies have the .com, .biz and so on. And there isn’t very clear definition what each domain is for."

In an interview, he hinted that an international body like the UN could do the governance of the domain names.

"I think that the top level domains, it is very important, are run fairly internationally with a fair representation of businesses and consumers worldwide, not just the companies that run the Internet. I think that whenever you have something that represents the whole world, like the United Nations, it becomes bureaucratic and it becomes slow, because it takes a long time to take into account everybody’s point of view. So we should be prepared to put up with some bureaucracy."

Berners-Lee also dismissed the whole controversy saying that the domain names are not as critical as the standard setting process is.

"We don’t need a domain name system in which you could very very quickly get a new domain name. Domain names are not the most critical part for the functioning of the Web. The Web depends on the development of standards, I think we should put our energy into creating new standards, bringing new technologies, like open standards for video encoding, open standards for data communication, putting scientific and clinical data out there on the Web, to spread that sort of information between countries. I think that sort of thing is very important, that’s where our energy should be spent."

See also

• History of the World Wide Web
• Network Neutrality
• Semantic Web

Publications

• Berners-Lee, Tim (1999). Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web. Britain: Orion Business. ISBN 0-7528-2090-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

Further reading

• Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide Web (Unlocking the Secrets of Science) Ann Gaines (Mitchell Lane Publishers, 2001) ISBN 1-58415-096-3
• Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (Ferguson's Career Biographies) Melissa Stewart (Ferguson Publishing Company, 2001) ISBN 0-89434-367-X children's biography
• Weaving the Web Fischetti, Mark (Harper Collins Publishers,1999) ISBN 0-06-251586-1(cloth) ISBN 0-06-251587-X(paper)
• How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web Robert Cailliau, James Gillies, R. Cailliau (Oxford University Press, 2000) ISBN 0-19-286207-3
• School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton
• BBC2 Newsnight – Video interview clip of Berners-Lee on the read/write Web
• Technology Review interview