Tidbits from the Father of the WWW: Sir Tim Berners-Lee
BCS managing editor Brian Runciman interviews Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the eve of one of the biggest conferences about the Web: www2006. Some interesting tidbits:
- “Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order.” I wonder why this was mentioned. Maybe, it would have been more logical. Left most items would be the least specific while the right most would be the most specific.
- “The Google algorithm was a significant development.” Kudos from the Father of the WWW is a big feather on anybody’s cap.
- “… information must be made seamlessly available on any device.” Mobile Web has its blessing. Now if only mobile browsers implemented XHTML 1.0 Basic or MP properly. Too many device inconsistencies today. Doesn’t this remind us of the early web browsers? Even web browser’s today have rendering inconsistencies.
- On the ICANN issue, “The US should demonstrate that it is prepared to share control with the world in general.” This can lead to an important to change the world’s impression that the Internet is US-centric.
- On the issue of software patents, “… for the market to grow Web infrastructure must be royalty free.” Right on!
- “[The Web] is now coming to the end of its adolescence, maturing after a phase of testing its boundaries. Even phishing and spam have been part of its education.” Just like a kid does something bad and has to get punished?
- On where the Web was conceptualized, “This all happened at the beginning of the Web, in a pub in Edinburgh.”
- On the Semantic Web, “The Semantic Web approach can be visualized as rigid platelets of information loosely sown together at the edges.” Prmote decentralization for more organic network growth and making the web more machine friendly.
- and my personal favorite is “I would have skipped on the double slash - there’s no need for it.” Interestingly enough the double slash helps when I want to parse URLs in ugly log files like those of Apache. At least, I am sure that everything before it is a protocol description.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a Distinguished Chartered member of BCS, is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and professor of computer science at Southampton ECS.
April 2nd, 2006 at 11:08 pm
[…] 20 people who changed the industry. This article features Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner who were the two (2) Stanford folk who exploited the invention of the router to form Cisco Systems. Desh Deshpande who started Cascade Communications and introducted Frame Relay. A young engineer at Xerox PARC, Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet and started a company called 3Com. Ray Noorda, who at the helm of Novell, made the LAN a requisite component in every office in America. Radia Perlman for the spanning tree algorithm that made route convergence faster. Yakov Rekhter, the father of the Border Gateway Protocol, who founded Juniper Systems. Mark Andreessen, the father of the web browser. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web. Vinton Cerf, the father of the Internet, who is now with Google. Jon Postel, the promoter of Internet standardization. Laurie Bride, the mother of what later came to become ISO-OSI. Microsoft’s Bill Gates. IBM’s Lou Gersner. SUN’s Scott McNealy who said the “network is the computer”. Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. And a few others. […]