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Weaving the Web
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has been hailed by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest minds of this century.His creation has already changed the way people do business, entertain themselves, exchange ideas, and socialize with one another. With new online businesses and communities forming every day, the full impact of Berners-Lee's grand scheme has yet to be fully realized.
Now, this low-profile genius tells his own story of the Web's origins--from its radical introduction and the creation of the now ubiquitous WWW and HTTP acronyms to how he sees the future development of this revolutionary medium.
Berners-Lee offers insights to help listeners understand the true nature of the Web, enabling them to use it to their fullest advantage. He shares his views on such critical issues as censorship, privacy, and the increasing power of software companies in the online world.
Now, this low-profile genius tells his own story of the Web's origins--from its radical introduction and the creation of the now ubiquitous WWW and HTTP acronyms to how he sees the future development of this revolutionary medium.
Berners-Lee offers insights to help listeners understand the true nature of the Web, enabling them to use it to their fullest advantage. He shares his views on such critical issues as censorship, privacy, and the increasing power of software companies in the online world.
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First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Tim Berners-Lee
19 books101 followersSir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS (born 8 June 1955), also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid November.
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He was honoured as the "Inventor of the World Wide Web" during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working with a vintage NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium. He tweeted "This is for everyone", which instantly was spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience.
In June 2009 then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Berners-Lee would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force. Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, a UK Government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use. Commenting on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data in April 2010 Berners-Lee said that: "The changes signal a wider cultural change in Government based on an assumption that information should be in the public domain unless there is a good reason not to—not the other way around." He went on to say "Greater openness, accountability and transparency in Government will give people greater choice and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that matter to them."
In November 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation in order to "Advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive change."
Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favour of Net Neutrality, and has expressed the view that ISPs should supply "connectivity with no strings attached," and should neither control nor monitor customers' browsing activities without their expressed consent. He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network right: "Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights."
Berners-Lee joined the board of advisors of start-up State.com, based in London.
As of May 2012, Berners-Lee is President of the Open Data Institute.
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013 and Berners-Lee is leading the coalition of public and private organisations that includes Google, Facebook, Intel and Microsoft. The A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Berners-Lee will help to decrease internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He was honoured as the "Inventor of the World Wide Web" during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working with a vintage NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium. He tweeted "This is for everyone", which instantly was spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience.
In June 2009 then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Berners-Lee would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force. Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, a UK Government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use. Commenting on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data in April 2010 Berners-Lee said that: "The changes signal a wider cultural change in Government based on an assumption that information should be in the public domain unless there is a good reason not to—not the other way around." He went on to say "Greater openness, accountability and transparency in Government will give people greater choice and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that matter to them."
In November 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation in order to "Advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive change."
Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favour of Net Neutrality, and has expressed the view that ISPs should supply "connectivity with no strings attached," and should neither control nor monitor customers' browsing activities without their expressed consent. He advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network right: "Threats to the Internet, such as companies or governments that interfere with or snoop on Internet traffic, compromise basic human network rights."
Berners-Lee joined the board of advisors of start-up State.com, based in London.
As of May 2012, Berners-Lee is President of the Open Data Institute.
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013 and Berners-Lee is leading the coalition of public and private organisations that includes Google, Facebook, Intel and Microsoft. The A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Berners-Lee will help to decrease internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
January 5, 2016
Weaving the Web touched on the philosophical underpinnings of the Web which I loved. Highlighted is the fact the Internet exists to allow the free exchange of idea throughout humanity. Any organization that limits or throttles the content we consume or produce is against the very spirit of the Internet.
The history of the web as explained by Tim is as real and personal as it gets. It outshines the dry factual notes I got as a Computer Science undergraduate. To understand the professional struggles and work that went into making the open Web I know today is a gem.
The only thing I didn't like was that he spent too much time on small technical details such as URI. I know it was important but a few sentences would have done. There were a few other technical points that were drawn out. Anyone that wasn't technical would have been lost and those who already have some background in the Web would have been bored at the repetition.
Overall it was a solid book and I am grateful the creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, gave his first hand account of why and how it come to be.
The history of the web as explained by Tim is as real and personal as it gets. It outshines the dry factual notes I got as a Computer Science undergraduate. To understand the professional struggles and work that went into making the open Web I know today is a gem.
The only thing I didn't like was that he spent too much time on small technical details such as URI. I know it was important but a few sentences would have done. There were a few other technical points that were drawn out. Anyone that wasn't technical would have been lost and those who already have some background in the Web would have been bored at the repetition.
Overall it was a solid book and I am grateful the creator of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, gave his first hand account of why and how it come to be.
May 2, 2020
In retrospect, the growth of the Web seems almost inevitable, arising from characteristics of how the mind works and how people can interact with one another's ideas. In that sense, the story of its creation reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. In Vonnegut's novel, an illogical belief (Bokononism) is so in synch with the human mind that it spreads from person to person, like a force of nature.
Tim Berners-Lee tells his story in the first person, as autobiography, because the story of the Web is the story of his life. He conceived it, implemented it, and now heads the effort to shepherd it forward and help it thrive despite challenges from big business, big government, and clueless interpreters of the law, worldwide.
Over the years, the idea of the Web slowly formed in his mind. "Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realization that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realizations from many sides, until, by the wondrous offices of the human mind, a new concept jelled. It was a process of accretion, not the linear solving of one well-defined problem after another." (p. 3)
"Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked... Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything... Once a bit of information in that space was labeled with an address, I could tell my computer to get it. By being able to reference anything with equal ease, a computer could represent associations between things that might seem unrelated but somehow did, in fact, share a relationship. A web of information would form." (p. 4)
The power of this idea directly related to its simplicity and to the lack of central control.
"The art was to define the few basic, common rules of 'protocol' that would allow one computer to talk to another, in such a way that when all computers everywhere did it, the system would thrive, not break down. For the Web, those elements were in decreasing order of importance, universal resource identifiers (URIs), the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
"What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There was no central computer 'controlling' the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere that 'ran' the Web. The Web was not a physical 'thing' that existed in a certain 'place.' It was a 'space' in which information could exist." (p. 36)
When he looks ahead to the potential future impact of the Web on the world, he gets mystical.
"If we succeed, creativity will arise across larger and more diverse groups. These high-level activities, which have occurred just within one human's brain, will occur among ever-larger, more interconnected groups of people acting as if they shared a larger intuitive brain. It is an intriguing analogy. Perhaps that late-night surfing is not such a waste of time after all: It is just the Web dreaming." (pp. 201-202)
He now approaches this life-long challenge with a sort of religious awe and sense of responsibility toward humanity. The mindset in some ways is similar to the corporate culture of Digital Equipment under the guidance of Ken Olsen, where rule number one was "do the right thing."
"I feel that to deliberately build a society, incrementally, using the best ideas we have, is our duty and will also be the most fun. We are slowly learning the value of decentralized, diverse systems, and of mutual respect and tolerance. Whether you put it down to evolution or your favorite spirit, the neat thing is that we seem as humans to be tuned so that we do in the end get the most fun out of doing the 'right' thing." (p. 205)
The Web has been an important part of my life since 1993, so many of the events recounted in this book sound familiar, though I remember them in a different context. It's illuminating to see them all unfold through the perspective of the Web's creator. It's also disorienting to re-experience the central story of your own time presented as history -- to read about these events from the perspective of their long-term meaning -- with a beginning, a middle, and an end -- rather than as we heard about them or encountered their effects day-by-day, as disconnected happenings in an open-ended, continuing present-tense, with many possible outcomes. And it's gratifying to discover that behind it all at the beginning and guiding now -- collaboratively, unobtrusively through the World Wide Web Consortium -- is someone motivated and inspired by an optimistic vision based on faith in the human spirit -- a vision of the future totally different from the dark satiric world of Kurt Vonnegut.
"This system produced a weird and wonderful machine, which needed care to maintain, but could take advantage of the ingenuity, inspiration, and intuition of individuals in a special way. That, from the start, has been my goal for the World Wide Web.
"Hope in life comes form the interconnections among all the people in the world... We find the journey more and more exciting, but we don't expect it to end..."
Tim Berners-Lee concludes "The experience of seeing the Web take off by the grassroots effort of thousands gives me tremendous hope that if we have the individual will, we can collectively make of our world what we want." (p. 209)
Tim Berners-Lee tells his story in the first person, as autobiography, because the story of the Web is the story of his life. He conceived it, implemented it, and now heads the effort to shepherd it forward and help it thrive despite challenges from big business, big government, and clueless interpreters of the law, worldwide.
Over the years, the idea of the Web slowly formed in his mind. "Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realization that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realizations from many sides, until, by the wondrous offices of the human mind, a new concept jelled. It was a process of accretion, not the linear solving of one well-defined problem after another." (p. 3)
"Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked... Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which anything could be linked to anything... Once a bit of information in that space was labeled with an address, I could tell my computer to get it. By being able to reference anything with equal ease, a computer could represent associations between things that might seem unrelated but somehow did, in fact, share a relationship. A web of information would form." (p. 4)
The power of this idea directly related to its simplicity and to the lack of central control.
"The art was to define the few basic, common rules of 'protocol' that would allow one computer to talk to another, in such a way that when all computers everywhere did it, the system would thrive, not break down. For the Web, those elements were in decreasing order of importance, universal resource identifiers (URIs), the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
"What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There was no central computer 'controlling' the Web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere that 'ran' the Web. The Web was not a physical 'thing' that existed in a certain 'place.' It was a 'space' in which information could exist." (p. 36)
When he looks ahead to the potential future impact of the Web on the world, he gets mystical.
"If we succeed, creativity will arise across larger and more diverse groups. These high-level activities, which have occurred just within one human's brain, will occur among ever-larger, more interconnected groups of people acting as if they shared a larger intuitive brain. It is an intriguing analogy. Perhaps that late-night surfing is not such a waste of time after all: It is just the Web dreaming." (pp. 201-202)
He now approaches this life-long challenge with a sort of religious awe and sense of responsibility toward humanity. The mindset in some ways is similar to the corporate culture of Digital Equipment under the guidance of Ken Olsen, where rule number one was "do the right thing."
"I feel that to deliberately build a society, incrementally, using the best ideas we have, is our duty and will also be the most fun. We are slowly learning the value of decentralized, diverse systems, and of mutual respect and tolerance. Whether you put it down to evolution or your favorite spirit, the neat thing is that we seem as humans to be tuned so that we do in the end get the most fun out of doing the 'right' thing." (p. 205)
The Web has been an important part of my life since 1993, so many of the events recounted in this book sound familiar, though I remember them in a different context. It's illuminating to see them all unfold through the perspective of the Web's creator. It's also disorienting to re-experience the central story of your own time presented as history -- to read about these events from the perspective of their long-term meaning -- with a beginning, a middle, and an end -- rather than as we heard about them or encountered their effects day-by-day, as disconnected happenings in an open-ended, continuing present-tense, with many possible outcomes. And it's gratifying to discover that behind it all at the beginning and guiding now -- collaboratively, unobtrusively through the World Wide Web Consortium -- is someone motivated and inspired by an optimistic vision based on faith in the human spirit -- a vision of the future totally different from the dark satiric world of Kurt Vonnegut.
"This system produced a weird and wonderful machine, which needed care to maintain, but could take advantage of the ingenuity, inspiration, and intuition of individuals in a special way. That, from the start, has been my goal for the World Wide Web.
"Hope in life comes form the interconnections among all the people in the world... We find the journey more and more exciting, but we don't expect it to end..."
Tim Berners-Lee concludes "The experience of seeing the Web take off by the grassroots effort of thousands gives me tremendous hope that if we have the individual will, we can collectively make of our world what we want." (p. 209)
April 8, 2013
First third was interesting as TBL was closely involved in championing and shaping the Internet by introducing the web. Second third of the book was less interesting as he related his time spent on the W3C organization. Last third was a bit dull as he speculated on the future of the web. The book lost steam by the end.
April 9, 2019
Here I am, reading a book about web which was written in nearly 20 years ago, but still is as touching and interesting as it can be. It was an amazing experience to read about the creation of the web and the struggles Tim Berners-Lee had when trying to make his idea come true. I am from the web-generation, we are the people who were born after the web and grew up with it. We observed web becoming more powerful, yet we also can see what's going on now and how the initial idea of sharing the knowledge is fading, as the commercialization rate is growing.
Tim Berners-Lee is not only a great mind, but also an amazing individual.
Tim Berners-Lee is not only a great mind, but also an amazing individual.
September 16, 2023
The book covers the life of Tim Berners-Lee as he developed the World Wide Web—it ends in the year 2000 when it was written. The story is amazing and as a technical individual I really enjoyed the insights. Besides the technical challenges, Tim does a good job at explaining how the W3C is governed. As a whole, I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to people interested in web technology.
January 7, 2021
интересна только первая половина книжки, дальше как-то скучно
- WWW была далеко не первой попытки TBL создать гипертекстовую систему. 1980 он сбацал Enquire
- Тим Бернс Ли пытался продать свою идею связать гипертекстовую систему с интернетом многим разработчикам гипертекстовых систем. Все отказались, потому что не видели в этом особого смысла. Когда он увидел GUIDE то сказал себе, “бля, так эти ребята сделали все самое сложное, осталось сервер под это дело написать с протоколом нужным“. Но разработчики GUIDE вежливо послали его нахер.
- Внутри CERN он продавал свою систему как систему документооборота. Никому нахер не нужна абстрактная гипертекстовая система, думал он, а вот если сделать один полезный кейс, то может пригодится. Первый кейс — телефонный справочник всех сотрудников CERN. Оказался очень успешным и все пользовались с удовольствием.
- WWW был написан на Next и на языке.... Objective C
- Развитие WWW 20 лет назад он не предугадал.
- WWW была далеко не первой попытки TBL создать гипертекстовую систему. 1980 он сбацал Enquire
- Тим Бернс Ли пытался продать свою идею связать гипертекстовую систему с интернетом многим разработчикам гипертекстовых систем. Все отказались, потому что не видели в этом особого смысла. Когда он увидел GUIDE то сказал себе, “бля, так эти ребята сделали все самое сложное, осталось сервер под это дело написать с протоколом нужным“. Но разработчики GUIDE вежливо послали его нахер.
- Внутри CERN он продавал свою систему как систему документооборота. Никому нахер не нужна абстрактная гипертекстовая система, думал он, а вот если сделать один полезный кейс, то может пригодится. Первый кейс — телефонный справочник всех сотрудников CERN. Оказался очень успешным и все пользовались с удовольствием.
- WWW был написан на Next и на языке.... Objective C
- Развитие WWW 20 лет назад он не предугадал.
March 11, 2022
Người cha của web lên tiếng về đứa con tinh thần của mình. Cái thú vị nhất với t là link. Văn bản truyền thống thường đi theo thứ tự trên xuống trái qua phải. Nhưng hypertext có thể liên kết với các phần khác của nó, hay các văn bản khác giống như cách người suy nghĩ vậy. Một điểm thú vị khác là chuân RDF cho Semantic Web. Sách kết thúc ở năm 2000 và Tim đưa ra tầm nhìn về Semantic Web cho cả database với việc áp dụng RDF và XML. Có điều sau một vài hứng khởi ban đầu thì RDF ko đc áp dụng rộng rãi.
Một trùng hợp là tuần này mình vừa có bài nói ở cty về Dgraph, một công cụ có áp dụng ngữ pháp XML. Và giờ thì viết review này trên goodreads, có API dùng dữ liệu định dạng XML luôn.
Một trùng hợp là tuần này mình vừa có bài nói ở cty về Dgraph, một công cụ có áp dụng ngữ pháp XML. Và giờ thì viết review này trên goodreads, có API dùng dữ liệu định dạng XML luôn.
January 20, 2019
In this book, Tim Berners-Lee describes the history of the World Wide Web, sprinkled with a lot of his more philosophical ideas about the destiny of the Web. It starts off quite slow with him stuck at CERN, which is a creative environment where he is more or less free to work on his pet project, but nobody is really backing his ideas or seeing their true potential. It is quite frustrating to read about how hard it was to get his project off the ground (or the "bobsled" going, as Tim himself phrases it).
The pace picks up a bit with the founding of the W3C and makes for an interesting second third. In the last third, the book mostly dissolves into rambling about his personal ideas and opinions and projections for the future which were not that interesting to me (and some didn't seem to have aged very well -- such as his excitement for Java applets). His musings about the potential power of the Semantic Web, which span two chapters, were a bit uninteresting to me as well.
I give this book such a low rating because it contains less technical detail than I had hoped -- actually, almost none. Still, I quite enjoyed parts of the recollection of the history of the Web as well as the chapter about privacy and security on the Web. I would not recommend reading this unless for some reason you are deeply interested in the personal philosophical convictions of Tim Berners-Lee.
The pace picks up a bit with the founding of the W3C and makes for an interesting second third. In the last third, the book mostly dissolves into rambling about his personal ideas and opinions and projections for the future which were not that interesting to me (and some didn't seem to have aged very well -- such as his excitement for Java applets). His musings about the potential power of the Semantic Web, which span two chapters, were a bit uninteresting to me as well.
I give this book such a low rating because it contains less technical detail than I had hoped -- actually, almost none. Still, I quite enjoyed parts of the recollection of the history of the Web as well as the chapter about privacy and security on the Web. I would not recommend reading this unless for some reason you are deeply interested in the personal philosophical convictions of Tim Berners-Lee.
November 16, 2020
It’s hard to imagine anyone today sitting down to use the internet and then comparing that experience to attendance at a Unitarian Universalist church, yet Tim Berners-Lee began to attend this liberal and open-minded church and saw in it a physical manifestation of the platform he had designed. At the conclusion of his history of the World Wide Web (or what we commonly call the internet), he notes that some people had even asked if he designed the Web based on the principles of the UU church. No, he clarifies, that wasn’t the case. But it doesn’t strike him as unbelievable. Both the internet and the UU church function within a minimalist framework, allowing people from diverse backgrounds to work together. They connect people through “peer-to-peer” and not hierarchical relationships. The system becomes workable through an extension of mutual respect to others.
The last sentence of the book is a classic expression of techno-optimism: “The experience of seeing the Web take off... gives me tremendous hope that if we have the individual will, we can collectively make of our world what we want.” That can be seen as a re-statement of the Whole Earth Catalog, an eternal source code for tech: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” The shared notion is that human society would be much better if we were collectively freed from the contraints of faulty systems that keep individuals from reaching their potential. It’s clear that from the outset the internet wasn’t conceived of as a toy for people to enjoy. It would not be about convenience and enrichment. The internet was designed to disrupt and rearrange human society. Of course we now know that the end result wasn’t going to be a global UU church, far from it!
At about the midway point of Weaving the Web we are in 1995, and the World Wide Web is off and running like a fast bobsled. Leaders around the world are becoming aware of the reach of the internet, and at the G7 meeting of the world’s economic powers, the deputy president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, delivered a speech. Berners-Lee summarizes this speech as a plea for people around the world to “seize the new technology to empower themselves; to keep themselves informed about the truth of their own economic, political, and cultural circumstances...” Berners-Lee comments: “I could not have written a better mission statement for the World Wide Web.” But he didn’t know the end of the story of Thabo Mbeki, who ended up stumbling upon AIDS denialism through his internet searches. It’s estimated that over 300,000 South Africans died as a result of policies that stemmed from his denial of medical facts. In light of that health disaster, Mbeki’s full embrace of the internet for personal empowerment acquires a more sinister feel.
Perhaps that’s the story of the internet: overconfidence in the ability of individual human beings to serve as teacher of themselves. Part of the problem might be related to the positive experiences of Berners-Lee in social platforms. We’ve already noted his embrace of the UU church, but Weaving the Web begins at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is now the home of the Large Hadron Collider, and had always been a center for research into the fundamental questions of physics. In the early years of designing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee worked at CERN but devoted himself to this Web project. He recalls: “I was not employed by CERN to create the Web. At any moment some higher-up could have questioned how I was spending my time...” But that never seemed to happen. As a researcher he had freedom to design something quite outside expectations. And is it a surprise that the internet as we know it came from a space devoted to studying theoretical physics? More than other scientific fields, theoretical physics called for frictionless exchange across borders, and it involved a community of scientists who saw themselves as part of a global community. This is exactly the environment in which a universal platform like the internet could be imagined in such optimistic terms.
Throughout Weaving the Web Berners-Lee maintains a surprising insistence on the Web as “universal.” At first this might seem to be about compatibility. It’s annoying to move across borders and encounter incompatible power plugs, and so the World Wide Web needed to be a system that ran seamlessly above such issues. But the Web arises as something more than a matter of compatibility when he calls it a “universal, all-encompassing space.” We should consider what he meant by this. Berners-Lee seems to have realized that the web would represent a kind of tear in our spatial world. He notes that companies and nations have “always been defined by a physical grouping of people... Geography gave the world its military stability and cultural boxes.” But the Web pulls human beings out of this static concept of space and social grouping and opens up profoundly new ways of combining ourselves. The possibility of large-scale social groupings independent of physical space opens up for the first time, made possible by this new “universal space” of the internet.
There’s a passage in Weaving the Web that I find mysterious in its wording: “The Web should not be an isolated tool used by people in their lives, or even a mirror of real life; it would be part of the very fabric of the web of life we all help weave.” Two possibilities for the Web are introduced and quickly dismissed: 1) the Web as tool, 2) the Web as reflection to real life. Instead Berners-Lee opts for a view of the Web as a part of the fabric of our lives. I take this to mean that there will be no true distinction, finally, between our actual and our online lives. That is the perhaps the ultimate fruition of this concept of the universal: the Web is interwoven with life, and we are liberated from place.
Reading this book carefully, it didn’t seem like Berners-Lee really wanted to be liberated from place. Before moving to take up his position in the WWW Consortium at MIT, he was living in a small house in a French village, “the view from our front yard stretched straight across Geneva to Mont Blanc.” And since he takes evident joy in his family and the arrival of children, Berners-Lee doesn’t come across as some asshole entrepreneur (a familiar type). He doesn’t seem to care about the money. He nevertheless created this tear in time and space that we know as the internet, and which undermines that simple life and that view.
The last sentence of the book is a classic expression of techno-optimism: “The experience of seeing the Web take off... gives me tremendous hope that if we have the individual will, we can collectively make of our world what we want.” That can be seen as a re-statement of the Whole Earth Catalog, an eternal source code for tech: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” The shared notion is that human society would be much better if we were collectively freed from the contraints of faulty systems that keep individuals from reaching their potential. It’s clear that from the outset the internet wasn’t conceived of as a toy for people to enjoy. It would not be about convenience and enrichment. The internet was designed to disrupt and rearrange human society. Of course we now know that the end result wasn’t going to be a global UU church, far from it!
At about the midway point of Weaving the Web we are in 1995, and the World Wide Web is off and running like a fast bobsled. Leaders around the world are becoming aware of the reach of the internet, and at the G7 meeting of the world’s economic powers, the deputy president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, delivered a speech. Berners-Lee summarizes this speech as a plea for people around the world to “seize the new technology to empower themselves; to keep themselves informed about the truth of their own economic, political, and cultural circumstances...” Berners-Lee comments: “I could not have written a better mission statement for the World Wide Web.” But he didn’t know the end of the story of Thabo Mbeki, who ended up stumbling upon AIDS denialism through his internet searches. It’s estimated that over 300,000 South Africans died as a result of policies that stemmed from his denial of medical facts. In light of that health disaster, Mbeki’s full embrace of the internet for personal empowerment acquires a more sinister feel.
Perhaps that’s the story of the internet: overconfidence in the ability of individual human beings to serve as teacher of themselves. Part of the problem might be related to the positive experiences of Berners-Lee in social platforms. We’ve already noted his embrace of the UU church, but Weaving the Web begins at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is now the home of the Large Hadron Collider, and had always been a center for research into the fundamental questions of physics. In the early years of designing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee worked at CERN but devoted himself to this Web project. He recalls: “I was not employed by CERN to create the Web. At any moment some higher-up could have questioned how I was spending my time...” But that never seemed to happen. As a researcher he had freedom to design something quite outside expectations. And is it a surprise that the internet as we know it came from a space devoted to studying theoretical physics? More than other scientific fields, theoretical physics called for frictionless exchange across borders, and it involved a community of scientists who saw themselves as part of a global community. This is exactly the environment in which a universal platform like the internet could be imagined in such optimistic terms.
Throughout Weaving the Web Berners-Lee maintains a surprising insistence on the Web as “universal.” At first this might seem to be about compatibility. It’s annoying to move across borders and encounter incompatible power plugs, and so the World Wide Web needed to be a system that ran seamlessly above such issues. But the Web arises as something more than a matter of compatibility when he calls it a “universal, all-encompassing space.” We should consider what he meant by this. Berners-Lee seems to have realized that the web would represent a kind of tear in our spatial world. He notes that companies and nations have “always been defined by a physical grouping of people... Geography gave the world its military stability and cultural boxes.” But the Web pulls human beings out of this static concept of space and social grouping and opens up profoundly new ways of combining ourselves. The possibility of large-scale social groupings independent of physical space opens up for the first time, made possible by this new “universal space” of the internet.
There’s a passage in Weaving the Web that I find mysterious in its wording: “The Web should not be an isolated tool used by people in their lives, or even a mirror of real life; it would be part of the very fabric of the web of life we all help weave.” Two possibilities for the Web are introduced and quickly dismissed: 1) the Web as tool, 2) the Web as reflection to real life. Instead Berners-Lee opts for a view of the Web as a part of the fabric of our lives. I take this to mean that there will be no true distinction, finally, between our actual and our online lives. That is the perhaps the ultimate fruition of this concept of the universal: the Web is interwoven with life, and we are liberated from place.
Reading this book carefully, it didn’t seem like Berners-Lee really wanted to be liberated from place. Before moving to take up his position in the WWW Consortium at MIT, he was living in a small house in a French village, “the view from our front yard stretched straight across Geneva to Mont Blanc.” And since he takes evident joy in his family and the arrival of children, Berners-Lee doesn’t come across as some asshole entrepreneur (a familiar type). He doesn’t seem to care about the money. He nevertheless created this tear in time and space that we know as the internet, and which undermines that simple life and that view.
March 13, 2022
Hard to rate. Provides an insightful look into the inception of the Web from the first days at CERN, and the design of W3C to govern the Web. It doesn't have the narrative cohesion or punch of books authored by Journalists, and gets a little dry at the end with extensive discussion of the semantic web. On the other hand, as an historical document it is fascinating to see Berners-Lee grapple with issues that would become much larger challenges in the future, including net neutrality, user privacy, and the continued struggle to fight off walled gardens in cyberspace. Not necessarily a first recommendation to general audiences but of interest to people interested in the history and future of Internet governance.
February 4, 2021
Design. Destiny. Big words for something that is there in part because of random happenings.
The web is a bad design. It is not particularly good at anything, yet apparently it can be adapted to many things. Yet Netflix or YouTube have nothing to do with Berners-Lee as much as his inflated ego would want you to believe. These are sites that developed using the available tools. And the free Internet Explorer, as much blamed, has much more with the Web of today than this petty bureaucrat and his verbose protocol design.
The web is a bad design. It is not particularly good at anything, yet apparently it can be adapted to many things. Yet Netflix or YouTube have nothing to do with Berners-Lee as much as his inflated ego would want you to believe. These are sites that developed using the available tools. And the free Internet Explorer, as much blamed, has much more with the Web of today than this petty bureaucrat and his verbose protocol design.
April 29, 2016
We are in 1999, Berners-Lee goes about telling an honest account on how the www started. Sharing the hurdles to get funding at CERN and to convince people to use the system; phone book was the killer application. His colleagues even made jokes about the "world wide web" name and he had to move to MIT to start the W3C. Heck, is pretty damn hard change the world.
August 23, 2022
Although it came out in the year 2000, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web is as relevant today as it was when it was published. Weaving the Web is a memoir by Tim Berners-Lee about the creation and early growth of the Web. Most of the book concentrates on the ideas, insights, software, and previous attempts that led to the Web—as well as the decisions and evangelism that allowed it flourish in the ’90s. The last quarter of the book deals with Berners-Lee’s ideas about how the Web should evolve. Some of the philosophy behind the Web explained in Weaving is very relevant to current debates around censorship, centralized control of content, and privacy.
We cannot fully understand something if we do not understand its origin story. Weaving the Web fills in many blanks for the curious reader. Like any great creation, the Web did not form in a vacuum. It was the result of over a decade of experimenting by its creator. In the early chapters of Weaving the Web you feel like you are there with Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau as they pushed the Web forward. Like Jony Ive has said—ideas are fragile when they’re first created. You get a strong sense of how Berners-Lee nurtured his idea.
Perhaps even more interesting than the origin story, is the philosophy and core ideas that Berners-Lee imbued the Web with. Some of his outlook is surprising and insightful. For example, he does not credit HTTP or HTML as the most important innovation, but instead the URI. “It is the most fundamental innovation of the Web, because it is the one specification that every Web program, client or server, anywhere uses when any link is followed.” (page 39)
Throughout the book, Berners-Lee advocates for decentralization and for empowering individuals as creators. It’s important to note that the book came out at the height of the Web 1.0 era, before the onslaught of social media and YouTube-like content sharing sites. A time when the Web was very static. Yet, he didn’t intend it that way. “I never intended HTML source code (the stuff with the angle brackets) to be seen by users. A browser/editor would let a user simply view or edit the language of a page of hypertext, as if he were using a word processor.” (page 42)
The first web browser that Berners-Lee developed was also an editor. He continually encouraged companies to come out with combined browsers/editors but most declined. It’s interesting to think how differently the Web would have evolved had the browser/editor concept taken off.
Berners-Lee’s philosophy goes beyond technology. He designed the Web to be an open, decentralized system that anyone could participate in. “Whether inspired by free-market desires or humanistic ideals, we all felt that control was the wrong perspective. I made it clear that I had designed the Web so there should be no centralized place where someone would have to ‘register’ a new server, or get approval of its contents. Anybody could build a server and put anything on it.” (page 99)
As the Web has become more and more dominated by a few large tech companies, many feel this early philosophy has been lost. It’s not the current ethos. It’s not the way that most people interact with the Web. Berners-Lee was very prescient in understanding this threat. “If a company claims to give access to the world of information, then presents a filtered view, the Web loses its credibility. That is why hardware, software, and transmission companies must remain unbiased toward content. I would like to keep the conduit separate from the content.” (page 132)
The last quarter of Weaving the Web deals with Berners-Lee’s vision for how the Web should evolve. Much of it did not come to pass—at least not in the way he advocated. It includes explanations of standards like SMIL that never really took off. It speaks to how creating a standard is not as important as making a killer app. This section is interesting from a historical standpoint—to understand what people were thinking about after the first decade of the Web. But it’s not nearly as interesting as the rest of the book.
Overall, Weaving the Web does a great job recounting the story of the Web’s creation. It’s well written and insightful. Most importantly, it clearly states the philosophical underpinnings that inspired Berners-Lee and propelled the Web through its critical first phase of growth. It provides a lot of historical context and insight for many of our current debates around the Web.
We cannot fully understand something if we do not understand its origin story. Weaving the Web fills in many blanks for the curious reader. Like any great creation, the Web did not form in a vacuum. It was the result of over a decade of experimenting by its creator. In the early chapters of Weaving the Web you feel like you are there with Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau as they pushed the Web forward. Like Jony Ive has said—ideas are fragile when they’re first created. You get a strong sense of how Berners-Lee nurtured his idea.
Perhaps even more interesting than the origin story, is the philosophy and core ideas that Berners-Lee imbued the Web with. Some of his outlook is surprising and insightful. For example, he does not credit HTTP or HTML as the most important innovation, but instead the URI. “It is the most fundamental innovation of the Web, because it is the one specification that every Web program, client or server, anywhere uses when any link is followed.” (page 39)
Throughout the book, Berners-Lee advocates for decentralization and for empowering individuals as creators. It’s important to note that the book came out at the height of the Web 1.0 era, before the onslaught of social media and YouTube-like content sharing sites. A time when the Web was very static. Yet, he didn’t intend it that way. “I never intended HTML source code (the stuff with the angle brackets) to be seen by users. A browser/editor would let a user simply view or edit the language of a page of hypertext, as if he were using a word processor.” (page 42)
The first web browser that Berners-Lee developed was also an editor. He continually encouraged companies to come out with combined browsers/editors but most declined. It’s interesting to think how differently the Web would have evolved had the browser/editor concept taken off.
Berners-Lee’s philosophy goes beyond technology. He designed the Web to be an open, decentralized system that anyone could participate in. “Whether inspired by free-market desires or humanistic ideals, we all felt that control was the wrong perspective. I made it clear that I had designed the Web so there should be no centralized place where someone would have to ‘register’ a new server, or get approval of its contents. Anybody could build a server and put anything on it.” (page 99)
As the Web has become more and more dominated by a few large tech companies, many feel this early philosophy has been lost. It’s not the current ethos. It’s not the way that most people interact with the Web. Berners-Lee was very prescient in understanding this threat. “If a company claims to give access to the world of information, then presents a filtered view, the Web loses its credibility. That is why hardware, software, and transmission companies must remain unbiased toward content. I would like to keep the conduit separate from the content.” (page 132)
The last quarter of Weaving the Web deals with Berners-Lee’s vision for how the Web should evolve. Much of it did not come to pass—at least not in the way he advocated. It includes explanations of standards like SMIL that never really took off. It speaks to how creating a standard is not as important as making a killer app. This section is interesting from a historical standpoint—to understand what people were thinking about after the first decade of the Web. But it’s not nearly as interesting as the rest of the book.
Overall, Weaving the Web does a great job recounting the story of the Web’s creation. It’s well written and insightful. Most importantly, it clearly states the philosophical underpinnings that inspired Berners-Lee and propelled the Web through its critical first phase of growth. It provides a lot of historical context and insight for many of our current debates around the Web.
July 22, 2021
A very short history of the beginnings of the world wide web (WWW) from Tim Berner-Lee, the original architect of the supporting software, as well as the idea of the thing. For those who are familiar with the desktop/PC wars of the 90s, Berners-Lee's narrative will be a familiar one, as the terminal point of his narrative is at the point of the creation of the Netscape browser and the subsequent legal kerfuffle that embroiled both Netscape and Microsoft in that era when Microsoft began including their Internet Explorer browser in Windows 98'.
Berners-Lee recounts the developments of the WWW that led up to that point, which he had a significant hand, including not only the initial software authoring at CERN, including his original conception of using a graph-object as data type to house information (previously reference data at CERN and elsewhere were mostly implemented as simple lists objects), but his insight into a linking algorithm to make information retrieval more efficient. He also goes into the issues of figuring out how to setup the HTTP protocol/standard as well as the efforts at organizing multiple stakeholders outside of CERN to host the the WWW software across different geographies as the web expanded into all continents in the globe.
The story has been told many times, and there's not much new here. It is however, always interesting to hear/read it from someone who directly impacted the events, and I found it not a total waste of time in this case either. Berners-Lee also discusses his opinion of the future of web-development (now our past) to include an intelligent semantics web. Though he doesn't really go through in detail, he mentions possibilities of intelligence emerging out of the semantic web, but I couldn't really grasp what he was meaning in this case (as is often the situation when concepts like 'emergence' are invoked).
Overall, it is an important piece of writing for the history of computing. It is not really 'required' reading, but I find it helpful to understand how the originator of a technology viewed that technology at the time of it's creation, as well as understanding how they thought it would evolve (and seeing how it actually did evolve). In this respect, the book has utility. Conditional recommend.
Berners-Lee recounts the developments of the WWW that led up to that point, which he had a significant hand, including not only the initial software authoring at CERN, including his original conception of using a graph-object as data type to house information (previously reference data at CERN and elsewhere were mostly implemented as simple lists objects), but his insight into a linking algorithm to make information retrieval more efficient. He also goes into the issues of figuring out how to setup the HTTP protocol/standard as well as the efforts at organizing multiple stakeholders outside of CERN to host the the WWW software across different geographies as the web expanded into all continents in the globe.
The story has been told many times, and there's not much new here. It is however, always interesting to hear/read it from someone who directly impacted the events, and I found it not a total waste of time in this case either. Berners-Lee also discusses his opinion of the future of web-development (now our past) to include an intelligent semantics web. Though he doesn't really go through in detail, he mentions possibilities of intelligence emerging out of the semantic web, but I couldn't really grasp what he was meaning in this case (as is often the situation when concepts like 'emergence' are invoked).
Overall, it is an important piece of writing for the history of computing. It is not really 'required' reading, but I find it helpful to understand how the originator of a technology viewed that technology at the time of it's creation, as well as understanding how they thought it would evolve (and seeing how it actually did evolve). In this respect, the book has utility. Conditional recommend.
August 3, 2025
Given my recent interest in the building of the metaverse, someone suggested I check out this book on the creation of the Internet. I opted for the audiobook, read by none other than the author Tim Berners-Lee.
For those who never heard of Berners-Lee, he is globally credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web, in effect the visual and useful part of what we call "the Internet". Of course, not a single person is responsible for such a broad endeavour, but it is clear how many of the things that make up the online experience have the mark of the author. The book is a compelling read of the challenges to keep true to his vision of an open web, that could harmonise and make universal the access to information.
Not only do we get a gripping tales of how he was working on ubiquitous low-level underlying protocols like HTML, CSS, and HTTP, as well as his vision of intensive page linking (hence, "web") - both clear examples of success - but also of his strong philosophy throughout of making everyone a creator, and not just a consumer (by trying to have all browsers have an "edit" mode) and truly semantic connections - both not yet quite apparent in the www these days.
Knighted by the Queen in 2024, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee comes across as a kind and down-to-earth person, moved by a sense of duty that is truly inspiring. Furthermore, many of the discussions he was having in the late 80's and early 90's (while working at CERN, and later on W3C that he founded) still feel incredibly fresh and arguably even more important now, 35 years later, with the pervasiveness of the web and the move towards the metaverse.
Very recommended for history buffs and futurists alike.
For those who never heard of Berners-Lee, he is globally credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web, in effect the visual and useful part of what we call "the Internet". Of course, not a single person is responsible for such a broad endeavour, but it is clear how many of the things that make up the online experience have the mark of the author. The book is a compelling read of the challenges to keep true to his vision of an open web, that could harmonise and make universal the access to information.
Not only do we get a gripping tales of how he was working on ubiquitous low-level underlying protocols like HTML, CSS, and HTTP, as well as his vision of intensive page linking (hence, "web") - both clear examples of success - but also of his strong philosophy throughout of making everyone a creator, and not just a consumer (by trying to have all browsers have an "edit" mode) and truly semantic connections - both not yet quite apparent in the www these days.
Knighted by the Queen in 2024, (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee comes across as a kind and down-to-earth person, moved by a sense of duty that is truly inspiring. Furthermore, many of the discussions he was having in the late 80's and early 90's (while working at CERN, and later on W3C that he founded) still feel incredibly fresh and arguably even more important now, 35 years later, with the pervasiveness of the web and the move towards the metaverse.
Very recommended for history buffs and futurists alike.
February 10, 2022
The tale of the birth of the Web is a bit dry, but it's an incredibly important origin story. This helped clear up a lot of early Web history that I was a bit fuzzy on, especially regarding the role of CERN and early browser makers. The book shines when TBL describes his dreams about the past, present, and future of the Web. It drags when he describes the bureaucratic W3C organization.
There are some stand-out quotes in this book that really help underpin how radically different the Web is vs the things it replaced:
As for the future, the dream of the metadata-rich Web may never be quite like TBL envisioned, but then again it might. It may just take longer than he'd hoped.
There are some stand-out quotes in this book that really help underpin how radically different the Web is vs the things it replaced:
However, like many hypertext products at the time, [Dynatext] was built around the idea that a book had to be "compiled" (like a computer program) to convert it from the form in which it was written to a form in which it could be displayed efficiently. Accustomed to this cumbersome multistep process, the EBT people could not take me seriously when I suggested that the original coded language could be sent across the Web and displayed instantly on the screen.
As for the future, the dream of the metadata-rich Web may never be quite like TBL envisioned, but then again it might. It may just take longer than he'd hoped.
June 9, 2023
Published in 1999 when it must have seemed that the web had infinite potential for good. REally interesting to read how browsers came to market when before I'd only read the work of single developers. I love that Berners-Lee saw that AOL and Compuserve were attempting to create a curated universe of content when there was so much more out there. Berners-Lee writes of trust relationships that establish the structure and reach of the web. He writes of PGP and integrity, I wonder what he would make now of rampant crime enabled so readily and so widespread. He wrote of collaborative computing and browsers that could write as easily as read, and now we have these. He wrote of distributed computing and cloud storage and now we have these. He wrote of search and intent and cookies that counter trust and integrity with browsers and applications that respond to behavior and preference without integrity. He wrote of AI before there was AI and now its here. Just amazing vision, creativity and unbounded confidence in opportunity, without regard for consequences. Not sure I agree with the latter - abdicating responsibility.
May 3, 2025
An enjoyable book about the World Wide Web (what most folks now call "the internet"). Berners-Lee writes fairly well, and the book is equal parts memoir, pop-history, and philosophy. Not all parts of it are equally interesting, but on the whole the author manages to recount things in an enjoyable way. It's impressive for a work written in 1999 how prescient he was about some of the potential problems emerging with the internet -- privacy concerns, vertical monopolies, tracking people's interests to serve up better propaganda -- and nice that he doesn't shy away from discussing these. At times the man seems a bit naive, as his politics are an interesting blend of social libertarianism and (one imagines) general progressivism; this causes him to sometimes seemingly miss the simple idea that multiple people might conspire together to work in bad faith. That said, that hardly detracts from the work as a whole. Folks might also be happy to know that the author really avoids any trace of egoism given the importance of his work; he freely shares credit and is very aware he stood on the shoulders of giants.
April 6, 2023
This is an interesting account of the invention of the Web from the man most responsible for it. The idea struggled to be greenlit at CERN, but once it was it was quickly realized (thanks to the magic of the NeXT) and TBL moved to a proselytizing phase. By the time the book was written in 1999, the Web had exploded on to the seen, though the bubble had not yet burst. The last part of the book communicates his next vision, that of the Semantic Web. As history played out, that vision never really came to be - either people are too lazy to add the semantic metadata or protective of their data. However, it's now looking possible again but from a different angle - extracting semantic information with language models (birthed from that very Web of text) can enable the same kind of autonomous agents as the Semantic Web would have, in yet another case of "worse-is-better". The Web has matured a lot since this book, and is now a general purpose computing platform on billions of devices. Tim should be very proud of what he has accomplished.
September 16, 2024
It was fascinating to learn about the early days of the web from its creator. I didn’t mind the technical bits at all. It reminded me of one of the first books I listened to, How Music Got Free, less the piracy. I could tell that the book was a bit dated, as it was written some time ago, but in hindsight, the web turned out to be so much more than what it was initially used for.
I always thought the internet was only for universities and the military at first, but the reality is more nuanced than that. I chuckled at the part where the author describes a presentation where they had to somehow get internet (and power) using makeshift tools, whereas nowadays, presenters just open their laptops, connect to Wi-Fi, and they’re good to go.
As someone who grew up during the years when the internet became mainstream, I now better understand how ahead of the curve my elementary school classmates were when they bragged about having the internet at home. I was so excited when I could finally connect too, even if it was through a slow-ass modem. Oh, the noises it made, and how you couldn’t make a phone call while connected! It was painfully slow—I can’t even imagine that kind of slowness anymore. And yet, it was just 20 years ago.
Now I have symmetric gigabit, having transferred over 200 TB in the past 10 years, I feel lucky that this is the time I'm alive. I get to appreciate it.
I always thought the internet was only for universities and the military at first, but the reality is more nuanced than that. I chuckled at the part where the author describes a presentation where they had to somehow get internet (and power) using makeshift tools, whereas nowadays, presenters just open their laptops, connect to Wi-Fi, and they’re good to go.
As someone who grew up during the years when the internet became mainstream, I now better understand how ahead of the curve my elementary school classmates were when they bragged about having the internet at home. I was so excited when I could finally connect too, even if it was through a slow-ass modem. Oh, the noises it made, and how you couldn’t make a phone call while connected! It was painfully slow—I can’t even imagine that kind of slowness anymore. And yet, it was just 20 years ago.
Now I have symmetric gigabit, having transferred over 200 TB in the past 10 years, I feel lucky that this is the time I'm alive. I get to appreciate it.
October 20, 2021
No man has had a greater influence on the World Wide Web than its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. This book, written by the man himself, tells his story about where the Web came from and how it progressed from a small project to help scientists communicate more effectively with each other to the phenomenon that is now compared with Gutenberg's press in the way it allows knowledge to be spread.
The book can be separated into two parts: the invention of the web and its protocols and its acceptance around the world, and Berners-Lee's time as the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The first part is by far the more interesting.
The book can be separated into two parts: the invention of the web and its protocols and its acceptance around the world, and Berners-Lee's time as the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The first part is by far the more interesting.
January 29, 2024
Whilst I loved the technical discussion -- especially because there's a modern sort of bias to think about technological problems through the lens of contemporary frameworks, so it was refreshing to get a kind of pure c.s. theory view of the interwebs -- the most fascinating part of this was how Berners-Lee discusses his vision of the politics and sociology of the internet. His discussion of the need for institutions to regulate the development of the web and also his discussion of the problems of monopolies and violation of antitrust laws predicted a lot of what would unfold in the next two decades. A great read for anyone interested in the effects of the internet of computer science.
June 17, 2024
Bit dated but still interesting to hear from the man who invented the internet about the challenges faced when created the internet. It goes through what inspired Tim to do it, some early challenges faced, how it became adopted, people who helped him create it, organisations who helped him create it etc. It does finish at the end of the 90s when we were still a good distance off the current ubiquitousness of the internet, but there are some foreshadowing statements from Berners-Lee surrounding the control of information that might scare one a little bit about today's current data climate.
November 12, 2017
Sir TimBL changed our world profoundly by inventing the World Wide Web. He is a humanitarian. He foresaw the good and the bad his technology would bring and worked hard to stave off the worse elements. I can only thank him for my career and the gifts he bestowed upon humanity. It is now in our hands to make sure it does more good than harm.
This is a must read book, especially if you do any work in technology.
This is a must read book, especially if you do any work in technology.
February 7, 2021
The World Wide Web, equal parts a great equalizer and great divider. I learned a lot about the history of how it came to be and was impressed with how much thought went into how to have it be open and free with considerations of privacy, accessibility, security, censorship, etc. All of those topics are so relevant even twenty years after this book was written, especially net neutrality. This incredibly nerdy book was also incredibly interesting!
September 2, 2019
I was surprised at how readable this was, and then surprised at how the author ties his belief in the Web to Unitarian Universalist beliefs. His arguments for a semantic web that will, in some ways, supplant and assist the role of human intuition seems to articulate the way information technology has actually been used to control us, unfortunately
December 22, 2020
This book blew my mind specially the first third part of the book. How Tim didn't give up and believing in his work continue to push it despite all the challenges he faced. In today's time the last part of the book would feel outdated but it was good to know the creator of web's speculation for the future of the web which in today's time is a reality, most of it.
December 14, 2018
Very interesting for a look into the history of the the web's creation and its spread. The latter chapters haven't aged well. Overly optimistic (where is the semantic web these days?) and a little sad when looking at how the web has influenced society through social media.
February 9, 2023
An inspiring and very optimistic view of how the web began and where it might go. I laughed in several places and reminisced about the early stages of the web. Fun and relatable. Highly recommend for tech geeks, especially Xers.
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