Berners-Lee on the read/write web
BBC NEWS | Technology | Berners-Lee on the read/write web: "In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight's Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web"...."The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.
For years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most people wasn't a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web pages became difficult and complicated for people. What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple.
When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium...."
in 30 years...."the web will be, hopefully, will be something which is sunk into the background as an assumption. Now, if as technologists develop, we've done our job well, the web will be this universal medium, which will be very, very flexible. It won't, itself, have any preconceived notions about what's built on top.
One of the reasons that I want to keep it open like that, is partly because I want humanity to have it as a clean slate. My goal for the web in 30 years is to be the platform which has led to the building of something very new and special, which we can't imagine now..."
SIR TIM BERNERS-LEE
Born in London in 1955
Read physics at Queen's College, Oxford
Banned from using university PC for hacking
Built own computer with old TV, a Motorola microprocessor and soldering iron
Created web in late 1980s and early 1990s at Cern
Offered it free on the net
Founded World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in 1994
Named by Time magazine as one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th century
Knighted in 2003
posted by Jen @ 8:01 am
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