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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.

-Tim Berners-Lee

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What Is A Web

Tim Berners-Lee

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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.

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More From Tim Berners-Lee

I Invented The Web Just Because I Needed It Really Because It Was So Frustrating That It Didn't Exit.

Now, If Someone Tries To Monopolize The Web, For Example Pushes Proprietary Variations On Network Protocols, Then That Would Make Me Unhappy.

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.

Compared Even To The Development Of The Phone Or Tv, The Web Developed Very Quickly.

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.

The Dream Behind The Web Is Of A Common Information Space In Which We Communicate By Sharing Information.

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.

You Can’t Propose That Something Be A Universal Space And At The Same Time Keep Control Of It.

I Want To Know If I Look Up A Whole Lot Of Books About Some Form Of Cancer That That's Not Going To Get To My Insurance Company And I'm Going To Find My Insurance Premium Is Going To Go Up By 5% Because They've Figured I'm Looking At Those Books.

Innovation Is Serendipity, So You Don't Know What People Will Make.

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.

Ai Is Not Just Heading For Our Industry, It Will Radically Change The Machinery We Use In Marketing.

The Google Algorithm Was A Significant Development. I've Had Thank-you Emails From People Whose Lives Have Been Saved By Information On A Medical Website Or Who Have Found The Love Of Their Life On A Dating Website.

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.

Acceptance Is The Spiritual Hammock.

I Should Be Able To Pick Which Applications I Use For Managing My Life, I Should Be Able To Pick Which Content I Look At, And I Should Be Able To Pick Which Device I Use, Which Company I Use For Supplying My Internet, And I'd Like Those To Be Independent Choices.

The Web As I Envisaged It, We Have Not Seen It Yet. The Future Is Still So Much Bigger Than The Past.

Any Good Software Engineer Will Tell You That A Compiler And An Interpreter Are Interchangeable.

It Was The Academic Community Who Wired Up Their Universities So It Was Put Together By Smart, Well-meaning People Who Thought It Was A Good Idea.

Everybody Who Runs A Web Site Knows We're Not Assured Of Compatibility, And We Could End Up With A Split.

What I Do Has To Be A Function Of What I Can Do, Not A Function Of What People Ask Me To Do.

Forming Of A Web Of Information Nodes Rather Than A Hierarchical Tree Or An Ordered List Is The Basic Concept Behind Hypertext.

We Shouldn't Build A Technology To Colour, Or Grey Out, What People Say. The Media In General Is Balanced, Although There Are A Lot Of Issues To Be Addressed That The Media Rightly Pick Up On.

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.

We Need Diversity Of Thought In The World To Face The New Challenges.

When You Understand Things, There's No More Magic.

If You Are Not On The Web, You Will Have Problems Accessing Services.

It Was Never Clear That It Wouldn't Just Stop (the Www). Any Time During That Exponential Growth, It Could Have Stalled. I Think We Were Never Very Confident Until 1993.

The Ultimate Goal Of The Web Is To Support And Improve Our Weblike Existence In The World. We Clump Into Families, Associations, And Companies.

A Hacker To Me Is Someone Creative Who Does Wonderful Things.

The Semantic Web Isn't Inherently Complex. The Semantic Web Language, At Its Heart, Is Very, Very Simple. It's Just About The Relationships Between Things.

It's Mine - You Can't Have It. If You Want To Use It For Something, Then You Have To Negotiate With Me. I Have To Agree, I Have To Understand What I'm Getting In Return.

I Think It Projects Are About Supporting Social Systems - About Communications Between People And Machines. They Tend To Fail Due To Cultural Issues.

The Internet Explodes When Somebody Has The Creativity To Look At A Piece Of Data That's Put There For One Reason And Realise They Can Connect It With Something Else.

The Concept Of The Web Is Of Universal Readership.

When Somebody Has Learned How To Program A Computer ... You're Joining A Group Of People Who Can Do Incredible Things. They Can Make The Computer Do Anything They Can Imagine.

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.

Computers Might Not Find The Solutions To Our Problems, But They Would Be Able To Do The Bulk Of The Legwork Required, Assist Our Human Minds In Intuitively Finding Ways Through The Maze.

My Own Personal Preference Is That The Consumer, The Individual Person Should Be Protected Because Individual People And The Difference Between Individual People And The Diversity We Have Between People On The Planet Is So Important.

Any Enterprise Ceo Really Ought To Be Able To Ask A Question That Involves Connecting Data Across The Organization, Be Able To Run A Company Effectively, And Especially To Be Able To Respond To Unexpected Events. Most Organizations Are Missing This Ability To Connect All The Data Together.

Customers Need To Be Given Control Of Their Own Data-not Being Tied Into A Certain Manufacturer So That When There Are Problems They Are Always Obliged To Go Back To Them.

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.

The Web Does Not Just Connect Machines, It Connects People.

You Affect The World By What You Browse.

To Be A Hacker - When I Use The Term - Is Somebody Who Is Creative And Does Wonderful Things.

In '93 To '94, Every Browser Had Its Own Flavor Of Html. So It Was Very Difficult To Know What You Could Put In A Web Page And Reliably Have Most Of Your Readership See It.

I Suppose It's Amazing When You Think How Many Things People Get Involved In That Don't Work.

The Most Important Thing That Was New Was The Idea Of Uri-or Url, That Any Piece Of Information Anywhere Should Have An Identifier, Which Will Allow You To Get Hold Of It.

The Web Is Now Philosophical Engineering. Physics And The Web Are Both About The Relationship Between The Small And The Large.

Physicists Analyse Systems. Web Scientists, However, Can Create The Systems.

It's Time To Recognise The Internet As A Basic Human Right. That Means Guaranteeing Affordable Access For All, Ensuring Internet Packets Are Delivered Without Commercial Or Political Discrimination, And Protecting The Privacy And Freedom Of Web Users Regardless Of Where They Live.

The Goal Of The Web Is To Serve Humanity. We Build It Now So That Those Who Come To It Later Will Be Able To Create Things That We Cannot Ourselves Imagine.

As More And More People Awaken To The Threats Against Our Basic Rights Online, We Must Start A Debate - Everywhere - About The Web We Want.

The Domain Name Server (dns) Is The Achilles Heel Of The Web. The Important Thing Is That It's Managed Responsibly.

If I Had Taken A Proprietary Control Of The Web, Then It Would Never Have Taken Off. People Only Committed Their Time To It Because They Knew It Was Open, Shared: That They Could Help Decide What Would Happen To It Next.. And I Wouldn't Be Raking Off 10%!

One Of The Things I Like About The Computer That I Use Is That I Can Write A Program On It Or I Can Download A Program On To It And Run It. That's Kind Of Important To Me, And That's Also Kind Of Important To The Whole Future Of The Internet... Obviously A Closed Platform Is A Serious Brake On Innovation.

I'm An Optimist About Humanity In General, I Suppose.

It's Possible To Live Without The Web. It's Not Possible To Live Without Water. But If You've Got Water, Then The Difference Between Somebody Who Is Connected To The Web And Is Part Of The Information Society, And Someone Who (is Not) Is Growing Bigger And Bigger.

We Can't Blame The Technology When We Make Mistakes.

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 Original Idea Of The Web Was That It Should Be A Collaborative Space Where You Can Communicate Through Sharing Information.

Freedom Of Connection With Any Application To Any Party Is The Fundamental Social Basis Of The Internet. And Now, Is The Basis Of The Society Built On The Internet.

Software Companies Should Take More Responsibility For Security Holes, Especially In Browsers And E-mail Clients. There Are Some Straightforward Things The Industry Should Be Doing Right Now To Fix Things, And I Don't Know Why They Haven't Been Done Yet.

Intellectual Property Is An Important Legal And Cultural Issue. Society As A Whole Has Complex Issues To Face Here: Private Ownership Vs. Open Source, And So On.

I Myself Feel That It Is Very Important That My Isp Supplies Internet To My House Like The Water Company Supplies Water To My House. It Supplies Connectivity With No Strings Attached.

Strings Attached

The Web Took Off In All Its Glory Because It Was A Royalty-free Infrastructure . . . 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 To End In The U.s.a. If We Had A Situation In Which The U.s. Had Serious Flaws In Its Net Neutrality, And Europe Did Have Net Neutrality, And I Were Trying To Start A Company, Then I Would Be Very Tempted To Move.

Technology Innovation Is Starting To Explode And Having Open-source Material Out There Really Helps This Explosion. You Get Students And Researchers Involved And You Get People Coming Through And Building Start Ups Based On Open Source Products.

Sites Need To Be Able To Interact In One Single, Universal Space.

One Way To Think About The Magnitude Of The Changes To Come Is To Think About How You Went About Your Business Before Powerful Web Search Engines. You Probably Wouldn't Have Imagined That A World Of Answers Would Be Available To You In Under A Second. The Next Set Of Advances Will Have An Different Effect, But Similar In Magnitude.

The Search Button On The Browser No Longer Provides An Objective Search, But A Commercial One.

I Think When You Have A Lot Of Jumbled Up Ideas They Come Together Slowly Over A Period Of Several Years.

When You Go Onto The Internet, If You Really Rummage Around Randomly Then How Do You Hope To Find Something Of Any Of Value?

Data Is A Precious Thing And Will Last Longer Than The Systems Themselves.

The Power Of The Web Is In Its Universality. Access By Everyone Regardless Of Disability Is An Essential Aspect.

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.

The World's Urban Poor And The Illiterate Are Going To Be Increasingly Disadvantaged And Are In Danger Of Being Left Behind. The Web Has Added A New Dimension To The Gap Between The First World And The Developing World. We Have To Start Talking About A Human Right To Connect.

The Amount Of Control You Have Over Somebody If You Can Monitor Internet Activity Is Amazing.

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.

It Is The The Duty Of A Webmaster To Allocate Uris Which You Will Be Able To Stand By In 2 Years, In 20 Years, In 200 Years.

We Should Work Toward A Universal Linked Information System, In Which Generality And Portability Are More Important Than Fancy Graphics Techniques And Complex Extra Facilities.

The More You Enter, The More You Become Locked In. Your Social-networking Site Becomes A Central Platform - A Closed Silo Of Content, And One That Does Not Give You Full Control Over Your Information In It. The More This Kind Of Architecture Gains Widespread Use, The More The Web Becomes Fragmented, And The Less We Enjoy A Single, Universal Information Space.

Web Applications Will Become More And More Ubiquitous Throughout Our Human Environment, With Walls, Automobile Dashboards, Refrigerator Doors All Serving As Displays Giving Us A Window Onto The Web.

Things Can Change So Fast On The Internet.

E-mail Is Interesting. We Can't Live With It, And You Can't Live Without It.

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.

Celebrity Damages Private Life.

In Many Ways, People Growing Up With The Web And Now The Semantic Web Take The Power At Their Fingertips For Granted.

Whatever The Device You Use For Getting Your Information Out, It Should Be The Same Information.

The Nice Thing About Programming At The Rdf Level Is That You Can Just Say, I'll Ask For All The Books. You Can Ask For All The Shelves. You Can Ask For A Given Shelf Whether A Book Was On It. And You're Not Worrying So Much About The Underlying Syntax.

I Think A Lot Of Great Software Has Been Written By People Who Are Scratching A Short-term Itch, Something Which Has Been Niggling Them For Ages, But In The Back Of Their Mind They’ve Got A Wonderful Long-term Plan.

[with Ai] Somebody's Going To Have To Think Of A Completely New Algorithm, A New Way Of Doing Goal-based Planning.

When It Comes To Professionalism, It Makes Sense To Talk About Being Professional In It. Standards Are Vital So That It Professionals Can Provide Systems That Last.

Professionalism

I Basically Wrote The Code And The Specs And Documentation For How The Client And Server Talked To Each Other.

It Professionals Have A Responsibility To Understand The Use Of Standards And The Importance Of Making Web Applications That Work With Any Kind Of Device.

It Was Really Hard Explaining The Web Before People Just Got Used To It Because They Didn't Even Have Words Like Click And Jump And Page.

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.

Working Together

On The Web The Thinking Of Cults Can Spread Very Rapidly And Suddenly A Cult Which Was 12 People Who Had Some Deep Personal Issues Suddenly Find A Formula Which Is Very Believable.

I Have Built A Moat Around Myself, Along With Ways Over That Moat So That People Can Ask Questions.

People Keep Asking Me What I Think Of It Now That It's Done. Hence My Protest: The Web Is Not Done!

I'm Not A Fan Of Giving A Website A Simple Number Like An Iq Rating Because Like People They Can Vary In All Kinds Of Different Ways. So I'd Be Interested In Different Organisations Labelling Websites In Different Ways.

There Are Converging Web-related Issues Cropping Up, Like Privacy And Security, That We Currently Have No Way Of Thinking About. Nobody Has Thought To Look At How People And The Web Combine As A Whole - Until Now.

[the Internet] Ought To Be Like Clay, Rather Than A Sculpture That You Observe From A Distance.

Web Users Ultimately Want To Get At Data Quickly And Easily. They Don't Care As Much About Attractive Sites And Pretty Design.

If Different Cultures Connect With Each Other, They Are Less Likely To Want To Shoot Each Other.

I Don't Mind Being, In The Public Context, Referred To As The Inventor Of The World Wide Web. What I Like Is That Image To Be Separate From Private Life, Because Celebrity Damages Private Life.

I Don't Know Whether Machine Translation Will Eventually Get Good Enough To Allow Us To Browse People's Websites In Different Languages So You Can See How They Live In Different Countries.

Most Larger Companies Now See That For The Market To Grow, Web Infrastructure Must Be Royalty-free.

We Need To Look At The Whole Society And Think, "are We Actually Thinking About What We're Doing As We Go Forward, And Are We Preserving The Really Important Values That We Have In Society? Are We Keeping It Democratic, And Open, And So On?"

Important Values

The Challenge Is To Manage The Web In An Open Way-not Too Much Bureaucracy, Not Subject To Political Or Commercial Pressures. The U.s. Should Demonstrate That It Is Prepared To Share Control With The World.

The Mobile Web Initiative Is Important - Information Must Be Made Seamlessly Available On Any Device.

I'm Very Aware There Are Lots Of Other People Who Are Just Bright And Working Just As Hard, With Just The Same Dedication To Make The World A Good Place.

That Idea Of Url Was The Basic Clue To The Universality Of The Web. That Was The Only Thing I Insisted Upon.

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.

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