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Tim Berners-Lee Vergil Bushnell. Known as the “Father of the Web” . Berners-Lee & the Web’s Origins . Born into a computing family in England. While employed by CERN in Geneva, worked on a database project, “Enquire.”
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Tim Berners-LeeVergil Bushnell Known as the “Father of the Web”
Berners-Lee & the Web’s Origins Born into a computing family in England. While employed by CERN in Geneva, worked on a database project, “Enquire.” Enquire attempted to create and catalog associations between separate items of information from this side project, he conceptualized the hyperlink.
Web Fundamental Concepts “When you make a link, you can link to anything.” • Universal Document Identifiers (UDI): now called URLs. Unique “serial numbers” for online data. • HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): allows easy authoring of web documents, including links. • HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol: codified the transmission of web content between client/server • First webclientand webserver (on NeXT)
Core Beliefs Reflected in Web Open Standards Universality Net Neutrality
Open Standards • Berners-Lee used freely available, open standards to create and popularize the Web, such as TCP/IP. Anyone could “plug into” and use these protocols. • Berners-Lee warns against the “walled garden” effect: AOL in the 90s. Or, as he states about Apple’s iTunes: • “You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace. For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up.”
Universality/Interoperability Access to all, including the disabled. • Web standards should be universal, accessible to anyone on any platform regardless of cost, Operating System or software. • Berners-Lee and the W3C urge interoperability as opposed to the closed, secret and proprietary.
Net Neutrality • Essentially, ISPs and governments: the maintainers of the Internet's “highways” (to use another 90's term) should impartially respect the flow of all online content. • Examples: Governments tracking or censoring dissenting opinions, like “The Great Firewall of China,” Comcast throttling the speeds of BitTorrent data. • Mergers of ISPs and Content Providers (AOL/TW)
The mission continues … • World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) • Semantic Web • WWW Foundation: working on a “Web Index” to survey global web access and usage • Knighted by the Queen • His work is explained in “Weaving the Web”