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1146 lines
62 KiB
1146 lines
62 KiB
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
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<html>
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<head>
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<title>Frequently asked questions by the Press - Tim BL</title>
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<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
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<link href="general.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
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</head>
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<body bgcolor="white" lang="en" text="#000000">
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<h3><a href="Overview.html"><img alt="Tim Berners-Lee"
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src="../../Press/Stock/Berners-Lee/2001-eur-head-quarter.jpg"
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align="right"></a></h3>
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<p>Note: Many of these questions are now answered in much more depth in my
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book, <a href="Weaving/Overview.html"><em><strong>Weaving the
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Web</strong></em></a></p>
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<h1>Frequently asked questions</h1>
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<p>I feel that after a while if I answer the same questions again, I will
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start answering rather mechanically, and will forget important steps, and
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after a while it won't make sense. So I have put a few answers from my
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outgoing mail in this list to save everyone time. But this list is (c) TBL so
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don't quote directly in the press without permission. Do feel free to quote
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for school projects. If you are doing a school project, I have a special <a
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href="Kids">page of questions that people tend to ask for reports</a>.
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Thanks.</p>
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<p></p>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="#Roles">Roles at MIT, W3C and Southampton?</a></li>
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<li><a href="#Spam">Spam - "Please stop sending it to me"! (2002/4)</a></li>
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<li><a href="#have">I have this great new idea - changing the world</a></li>
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<li><a href="#What">What's happening?</a> (2000)</li>
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<li><a href="#What1">What about peer-peer file sharing?</a></li>
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<li><a href="#General1">General questions 1999</a></li>
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<li><a href="FAQ.html#General">General questions 1998</a>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="#Internet">Q: I understand you invented the
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Internet....</a></li>
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<li><a href="#InternetWeb">Q: What is the difference between the Net
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and the Web?</a></li>
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<li><a href="#What2">What did you have in mind when you first developed
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the Web?</a></li>
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</ul>
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<p></p>
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</li>
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<li><a href="FAQ.html#Examples">Examples of early WWW hypertext</a>
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<ul>
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<li>What was the first web page?</li>
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</ul>
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</li>
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<li><a href="#Physics">Physics: why and influence</a></li>
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<li><a href="FAQ.html#standards">W3C and standards (1996)</a></li>
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<li><a href="FAQ.html#Machinery">What computer do you use?</a></li>
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<li><a href="FAQ.html#Cailliau">Robert Cailliau's role</a></li>
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<li><a href="#cernoffice">Where exactly did you work at CERN?></a></li>
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<li><a href="FAQ.html#Spelling">Spelling of WWW</a></li>
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<li><a href="#etc">Why the //, #, etc?</a></li>
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<li><a href="FAQ.html#browser">What were the first browsers?</a></li>
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<li><a href="FAQ.html#Influences">What influenced the design of the
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web?</a></li>
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<li><a href="#your">Why is your email address on my screen?</a></li>
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<li><a href="#tell">Can you tell me more about your personal life?</a></li>
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</ul>
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<p></p>
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<h3></h3>
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<h3 id="FOAF"><a name="LinkedIn">Please update</a> your address book at
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(site)</h3>
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<p>Q: I'm updating my address book entries on (some site which shares contact
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information). Could you log on and update your address book, please? Then we
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can keep in touch and easily track changes to each other's addresses.</p>
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<p>A: No, I have a <a href="http://www.foaf-project.org/">FOAF</a> file. Do
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you? Why should I have to get an account at every site which keeps a record
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of me? That's not using the web. In fact I have that information on the web
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as data. A URI for me is</p>
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<p>http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i</p>
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<p>That is available in RDF, the W3C standard for generic data interchange,
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as card.rdf, and also on Notation3 at card.n3. You can use programs like the
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tabulator or Foafnaut for reading FOAF files, and various sites index then in
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various ways. </p>
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<p>You will notice that my FOAF page has links to information about my
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organization, whose URI is http://www.w3.org/data#W3C, and the page
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http://www.w3.org/data has links to the W3C publications and organizational
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structure and so on.</p>
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<p>If you are updating your address book, please take the time to publish a
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FOAF page. (PS: Plaxo <a
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href="http://support.plaxo.com/bin/answer.py?answer=642">says it supports
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FOAf</a> but I don't know how well) If you join the <a
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href="http://my.opera.com/community/"> Opera community</a>, or
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<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/">LiveJornal</a>,
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you get a FOAF page automatically.</p>
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<h3 id="Roles">Roles at W3C, MIT and Southampton?</h3>
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<p>(2004) When I moved to MIT from CERN in 1994, it was to start the World
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Wide Web Consortium and act as its Director. Since then, my time has been
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split between the various tasks that involves, and, once the W3C was running
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smoothly, also forward-looking research into the future of decentralized
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systems like the Web and specifically the Web of machine-processsable data,
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the "Semantic Web". In 2002, Steve Bratt joined W3C as Chief Operating
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Officer and in 2006 was named CEO, which made that part of my life much
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easier, and made W3C run very much more effectively. In 2004, I also accepted
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a part-time post at Southampton University in the UK. Southampton is one of
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the leading sites in Semantic Web research in the UK. While this will take a
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fairly limited amount of my time, I hope it will help collaboration between
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MIT and Southampton, and it will allow me to help Southampton and MIT to plan
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future research directions.</p>
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<p>My roles as W3C Director and resarcher at CSAIL continue. With Steve in
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the CEO position, I can emphasize the technical side of my work such as that
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with the W3C Technical Architecture Group.</p>
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<h3 id="Spam">Spam - "please stop sending it to me!"</h3>
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<p>This question is one I have started (2002/04) getting more and more
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frequently. It is (ironically) normally sent automatically by people who are
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so enraged by spam (unsolicited bulk commercial email) that they try to find
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some way to protest to someone who will be able to stop the spammers. Most
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self-respecting Internet Service Providers will terminate their contract with
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anyone who abuses the service. So it is a reasonable to take that approach.
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So these people generally set up a program to check through the email to find
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the web page it points to. Spammers are always after people's money, so
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there is some pointer to a web site which will (indirectly) take it. The plan
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is basically that these folk search the email message for pointers to web
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sites, and then search the domain name information to find out who is
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responsible for that domain. They then try to email someone "upstream" who
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will cut off the spammer's email access.</p>
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<p>If you are one of these people, and you end up mailing me (timbl@w3.org)
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it is probably because I am one of the contacts for www.w3.org. Why do you
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find www.w3.org? Because you search the hypertext (HTML) email too
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simplistically and you found the XML namespace identifier which defines the
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HTML language. This is a NOT a hypertext link. It identifies the
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specification of the language in which the email is written. The identifier
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in www.w3.org space is there because the World Wide Web consortium is the
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body which defines HTML. So w3.org has nothing to do with the sender of the
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spam. So if you vent your frustration on me, it just shows the software you
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are using is broken.</p>
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<p>By the way, I don't know whether the technique works. I have a horrible
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feeling that the spammers will just revel in the feedback they get from this.
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But I don't know. Check out abuse.net from which I have got some of these. I
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am <em>not</em> mad at you for trying to stop spam. I am mad at those who
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spammed you. For the record:</p>
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<ul>
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<li>I hate spam.</li>
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<li>I and my staff waste a significant amount of time deleting spam.</li>
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<li>I feel that those who make their living sending spam damage the whole
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community for the sake of greed.</li>
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<li>The lie "you are only getting this because you have been signed up for
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it" makes me sick.</li>
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<li>My handling change for unsolicited bulk email is $10,000 plus recovery
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costs and legal fees.</li>
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<li>I would support legislation which made it illegal to to falsify or omit
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the full identification of those responsible for any commercial mail.</li>
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<li>I believe that the falsification of email headers for one's own gain
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and other's loss is fraudulent.</li>
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</ul>
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<p>See also:</p>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="/Help/Webmaster#spam">W3C webmaster FAQ on this issue</a></li>
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</ul>
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<h3 id="have">I have a great idea -Changing the world</h3>
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<p><em>Q: I have been working for a long time on a very special and new idea
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which will revolutionize computing. Can I tell you about it?</em></p>
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<p>A: This is the most difficult answer to have to write. I am sorry to say
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that I can't give your vision of the future the time it would take to compare
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it with existing architectures and point out the similarities and
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dissimilarities. I get quite a few requests like this. What I would humbly
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suggest (and only suggest) is that you do that comparison piecemeal, and -
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while keeping your vision in mind -- try to find the first piece to implement
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in the move toward what you envisage. The world is can only really be changed
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one piece at a time. The art is picking that piece.</p>
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<p>When you have, then use the web to find out who is working in that area.
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Acquaint yourself with the vocabulary they use for talking about it. Find a
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way of explaining your novel idea in their terms, after you have understood
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why it has not already been done your way. Then suggest that change. If it
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is an idea in computing, then you may want to write the code to show that it
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works first.</p>
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<p>(I didn't find lots of people willing to get excited about the idea of the
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web. They quite reasonably asked to know why it was different from the past,
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or other hypertext systems. In retrospect, it was mainly that the
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decentralized database is removed, allowing the system to scale, but allowing
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for dangling links. But it took a long time for that to surface as the
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novelty.)</p>
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<h3><a name="What">What's happening? 2000</a></h3>
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<p><em>Q: What sort of technology should the forward-looking geeks in my
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company be looking at?</em></p>
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<p>A: You probably have a lot of people using XML by now. You should have
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someone looking at the next level - <a href="/RDF/">RDF</a>. Tell them not
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to worry about the syntax, but check out the model. This is a question of
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looking the data your company is storing and transferring, and making sure
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that it can be represented in that simple circles-and-arrows RDF way. This
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is very simple. An important trick is that you use URIs to identify the
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arrows as well as the circles. Doing this homework will ensure that you have
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a well-defined data model, which will allow you data to be combined, merged
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with any other RDF-model data. It will mean you will be able to multiply the
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power of separate application areas by running RDF queries and new RDF-based
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applications across both areas. It will mean that you will be there with
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talent which understands the basic model as the <a
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href="/2000/01/sw">Semantic Web</a> becomes all-important.</p>
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<p>Other things to watch: <a href="/Graphics/SVG/">SVG - Scalable Vector
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Graphics</a> - at last, graphics which can be rendered optimally on all sizes
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of device. The user interface world is rapidly becoming competent at <a
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href="/Voice/">voice input and output </a>and W3C has standards in that area
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coming along. <a href="/Signature/">XML Signature</a> will let you to
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digitally sign XML documents - find out how. But in general, always check out
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the <a href="/">W3C home page</a> for what's new.</p>
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<p>If your company/organization/self is a W3C member, then your Advisory
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Committee representative has the task of understanding everything which is
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happening in W3C, and everything in your company, and seeing where they
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should be introduced.</p>
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<h3><a name="What1">What do you think of peer-peer file sharing?
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(2000)</a></h3>
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<p><em>Q: What do you think about the peer-peer file sharing technology which
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allows people t copy copyrighted information so easily? </em> </p>
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<p>A: The issue is not simple - so I try to put my thoughts into a few words.
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In general, the way to make a sane society is to enact and enforce laws
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rather than to ban a given generic technology. (I would make the exception
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for things which are specifically designed to harm such as guns and nuclear
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bombs.) That said, one can make technology which supports our social and
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legal frameworks better if one does it deliberately. One of the four domains
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of the World Wide Web Consortium addresses <a href="/TandS/">Technology and
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Society</a> for this reason. For example, in this case, I think we really
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need standards for encoding the broad licensing terms of material so it can
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be read and handled automatically. Then we can see, when the technology
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allows one to see whether information is free or for pay, whether there is
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still a substantial problem of theft. The basic idea of forwarding copies
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automatically between machines is a technical optimization of the
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distribution protocol which is very useful and should not of itself be
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disallowed just because it -- like many powerful things -- can be abused. I'd
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point out that some ostensibly "peer-peer" systems are centralized system in
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fact, allowing centralized control and profit by the central server's owners.
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Other systems are really decentralized, having no central server. These are
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like internet news groups which have been around for ages and which raised
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similar issues.</p>
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<h3><a name="General1">General Questions, 1999</a></h3>
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<p><em>Q: What is your opinion on 'Cyber Squatting' for domain names? (-Lia
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Kim)</em></p>
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<p>A: Domain names are a scarce resource - one of the few scarce resources in
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cyberspace. I have little sympathy for those who scoop these up with the hope
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of speculating on their value. This is not one of the most helpful activities
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on the net. There are those who use their energy for the purposes of
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furthering the technology or the content or the world in some way, but just
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sitting on a domain name without using it in order to cash in later does not
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seem to me a constructive .</p>
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<h2><a name="General">General Questions, 1998</a></h2>
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<h3><a name="Internet"><em>Q: I understand you invented the
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Internet....</em></a></h3>
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<p>A: Sorry, not me! I was lucky enough to invent the Web at the time when
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the Internet already existed - and had for a decade and a half. If you are
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looking for fathers of the Internet, try <strong>Vint Cerf</strong> and
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<strong>Bob Kahn</strong> who defined the "Internet Protocol" (IP) by which
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packets are sent on from one computer to another until they reach their
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destination. See:</p>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="http://www.mci.com/cerfsup/">"Cerf's Up" : MCI WorldCom on
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technology"</a> with profile and FAQs by Vint, who currently works for
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MCI.</li>
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</ul>
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<p>Vint explains the timing:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>"The DESIGN of Internet was done in 1973 and published in 1974. There
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ensued about 10 years of hard work, resulting in the roll out of Internet
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in 1983. Prior to that, a number of demonstrations were made of the
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technology - such as the first three-network interconnection demonstrated
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in November 1977 linking SATNET, PRNET and ARPANET in a path leading from
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Menlo Park, CA to University College London and back to USC/ISI in Marina
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del Rey, CA."</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>David Clark, of MIT's LCS, is another one I can point to who put in the
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work in the 1970s which made the Web possible in the 1990s.</p>
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<p>Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn used, in making IP, the concept of packet switching
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which had been invented by <strong>Paul Barran</strong>.</p>
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<p>It is also good to mention the Domain Name Service upon which the web
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relies heavily. The protocols which make the DNS work were pioneered and
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standardized by <a
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href="http://www.nominum.com/about/chair-cso-bio.html">Paul
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Mockapetris</a>.</p>
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<h3><i><a name="InternetWeb">Q: What is the difference between the Net and
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the Web?</a></i></h3>
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<p>A: The Internet ('Net) is a network of networks. Basically it is made from
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computers and cables. What Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn did was to figure out how
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this could be used to send around little "packets" of information. As Vint
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points out, a packet is a bit like a postcard with a simple address on it. If
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you put the right address on a packet, and gave it to any computer which is
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connected as part of the Net, each computer would figure out which cable to
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send it down next so that it would get to its destination. That's what the
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Internet does. It delivers packets - anywhere in the world, normally well
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under a second.</p>
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<p>Lots of different sort of programs use the Internet: electronic mail, for
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example, was around long before the global hypertext system I invented and
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called the World Wide Web ('Web). Now, videoconferencing and streamed audio
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channels are among other things which, like the Web, encode information in
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different ways and use different languages between computers ("protocols") to
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provide a service.</p>
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<p>The Web is an abstract (imaginary) space of information. On the Net, you
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find computers -- on the Web, you find document, sounds, videos,....
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information. On the Net, the connections are cables between computers; on the
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Web, connections are hypertext links. The Web exists because of programs
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which communicate between computers on the Net. The Web could not be without
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the Net. The Web made the net useful because people are really interested in
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information (not to mention knowledge and wisdom!) and don't really want to
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have know about computers and cables.</p>
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<p>Questions below derived from those asked by Taiwan's <i>Commonwealth</i>
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magazine</p>
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<h3><i><a name="What2">Q: What did you have in mind when you first developed
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the Web?</a></i></h3>
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<p>From <a href="ShortHistory">A Short Personal History of the Web</a>:</p>
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<blockquote>
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A: The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we
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communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact
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that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or
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global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the
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dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a
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realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which
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we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our
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interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyze
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it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how
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we can better work together.</blockquote>
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<h3><i><a name="true">Q: Do you have had mixed emotions about "cashing in" on
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the Web?</a></i></h3>
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<p>A: Not really. It was simply that had the technology been proprietary,
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and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision
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to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You
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can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep
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control of it.</p>
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<h3><i><a name="happy">Q: Are you happy with what the World Wide Web has
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turned out so far?</a></i></h3>
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<p>A: That is a big question. I am very happy at the incredible richness of
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material on the Web, and in the diversity of ways in which it is being used.
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There are many parts of the original dream which are not yet implemented.
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For example, very few people have and easy, intuitive tool for putting their
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thoughts into hypertext. And many of the reasons for, and meaning of, links
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on the web is lost. But these can, and I think will, change.</p>
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<h3><i><a name="What3">Q: What do you think of the commercial turf wars going
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on the Web?</a></i></h3>
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<p>A: There has always been a huge competition to come out with the best Web
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technology. This has followed from the fact that the standards, being open,
|
|
allow anyone to experiment with new extensions. This produces the threat of
|
|
fragmentation into many Webs, and that threat brings the companies to the W3C
|
|
to agree about how to go forward together. It is the tension of this
|
|
competition and the need for standards which drives W3C forward at such a
|
|
speed.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h3><i><a name="What4">Q: What should the lay person be aware of as the Web
|
|
evolves?</a></i></h3>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: We should all learn to be information smart: to understand when a Web
|
|
site, or a piece of software, or an Internet Service provider plan, is
|
|
giving us biased information. We should learn to distinguish quality
|
|
information and quality links. As technology evolves, and
|
|
machine-understandable information on the Web becomes available, we should be
|
|
aware of the sudden changes which large-scale machine processing might have
|
|
on our businesses.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h3><i><a name="could">Q: How could the Web be a more interactive, creative
|
|
medium?</a></i></h3>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: Nothing can be perfect, but the Web could be a lot better. It would
|
|
help if we had easy hypertext editors which let us make links between
|
|
documents with the mouse. It would help if everyone with Web access also had
|
|
some space they can write to -- and that is changing nowadays as a lot of
|
|
ISPs give web space to users. It would help if we had an easy way of
|
|
controlling access to files on the web so that we could safely use it for
|
|
private, group, or family information without fear of the wrong people being
|
|
able to access it.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h3>Metadata</h3>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: You talked about the need for a metadata language. Can you tell us
|
|
laymen what it is? </i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: "Meta" is used with anything which is about itself - so a metabook
|
|
would be a book about books, and metadata is data about data. On the Web,
|
|
this means all sorts of information about information: its ownership,
|
|
authorship, distribution rights, privacy policy, and so on. These needs are
|
|
driving us to make ways of putting information on the web designed for
|
|
computers to be able to understand. Web pages at the moment in HTML are
|
|
designed to be read by humans. In the future, some Web pages will be in "RDF"
|
|
-- Resource Description Framework. This will be read by computer programs
|
|
which will help us organize ourselves and our data and possibly everything we
|
|
do.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h3>Privacy</h3>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: Are you worried about privacy on the Web?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: When it comes to privacy, my personal view is that the consumer needs
|
|
some legal or regulatory protection by default. The W3C has a project called
|
|
"P3P" for privacy which will allow a user to control if and how information
|
|
is given away to a Web server. P3P will allow Web sites to specify their
|
|
privacy policy and users to automatically be warned about sites whose
|
|
policies they don't like. See the <a href="../../P3P/Overview.html">P3P</a>
|
|
project.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h3>ECommerce</h3>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q. Do you shop online? What do you think about the E-Commerce?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: Yes, I buy a lot of things online myself. I think that Web shopping as
|
|
it is is only the tip of a huge larger change which will come when I can find
|
|
things and compare prices automatically, and when electronic financial
|
|
instruments are commonplace.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h3> Web and Education</h3>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: Peter Drucker has predicted that information technology will bring
|
|
about the demise of the university as currently constituted. Do you share
|
|
this view? What changes will the Web help bring to education?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: I hope that educators will pool their resources and create a huge
|
|
supply of online materials. I hope much of this will be available freely to
|
|
those especially in developing countries who may not have access to it any
|
|
other way. Then I think we will see two things. One will be that keeping
|
|
that web of material up to date will take a lot of time and effort - it will
|
|
seem like more effort than creating it in the first place. The other is that
|
|
we will see how essential people, and their wisdom, and their personal
|
|
interactions, are to the educational process. A university is a lot more
|
|
than its library.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h3>The effect of the Web on how we work</h3>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: How do you see the web shape the new, knowledge-based
|
|
economy?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: The Web is simply a name for all the information you can get online. So
|
|
it will be the abstract place where the knowledge-based economy happens.
|
|
Already the W3C staff team works with three international sites, many
|
|
offices, and several people working from or near home. The Web will open up
|
|
new forms of business altogether, and make us rethink the way we run existing
|
|
businesses. It can turn bureaucracy over to machines, and let people get on
|
|
with the creativity. It will help us see where we each fit, with our own
|
|
experience, talents and passions, among the millions of other people and
|
|
theirs. It can help us work together more effectively, remove
|
|
misunderstanding, and bring about peace and harmony on a global scale. But
|
|
it can only do these things is we learn to use it wisely, and we think very
|
|
carefully about both the technology and the laws we make or change around
|
|
it.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p></p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="Examples">Examples of early WWW hypertext</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p><em>Q: What was the first web page?</em></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: Apart from local "file:" URLs on my machine (which was the first
|
|
browser as well as the first server), the first http one (end of 1990) was
|
|
basically</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>An alias was made so that this was later known as</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>It is not now (alas) served but a later (1992) copy of the original pages
|
|
exists at <a
|
|
href="/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html">http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html</a></p>
|
|
|
|
<p><em>Q: Do you have any examples of the early Web which we could compare
|
|
with the current Web?</em></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: (1997): I don't have a very early 1990,91 snapshot but there is a
|
|
snapshot of our web as of November 1992, much of which dates from earlier.
|
|
(Some pages for some reason don't work with Netscape 3.0 for some reason it
|
|
doesn't the old HTML for some reason or perhaps it just has a bug. They do
|
|
work with Internet explorer 4.0)</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>There is a <a
|
|
href="../../History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/DesignIssues/Overview.html">list
|
|
of design issues</a> and a <a
|
|
href="../../History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/Conferences/ECHT90/Introduction.html">trip
|
|
report on the 1990 European Conference on HyperText</a> and a <a
|
|
href="../../History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/Conferences/ECHT90/Standardisation.html">note
|
|
on the "state of standardization" </a>(!) and an example of the use of the
|
|
web as a collaborative tool in some <a
|
|
href="../../History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/DesignIssues/Topology.html">shared
|
|
notes on the topology of the web</a> I wrote and Jean-Francois Groff
|
|
annotated .</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>The pages will look much the same as they did originally, although the
|
|
actual style sheet I used as a default with the original browser/editor you
|
|
can see converted approximately into a CSS style sheet if you read my <a
|
|
href="../../Provider/Style/Overview.html">Style Guide for Online Hypertext
|
|
</a>with a CSS-compliant browser such as IE 4.0.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Some of the links in the historical stuff have been accidentally saved
|
|
(much later) incorrect absolute links -- if you really want to follow them
|
|
you can see where they ought to have gone by stripping of the prefix.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p></p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="Physics">Physics: why and influence</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>(Based on replies to David Brake, "New Scientist",1997/9)</p>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: Why did you study physics?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A (1997) : My parents are both mathematicians: they actually met while
|
|
working on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. My
|
|
mother has been dubbed the "first commercial computer programmer" as she went
|
|
with the machine when it was installed on the customer site. So we played
|
|
with 5 hole paper tape, and learned to enjoy mathematics wherever it cropped
|
|
up, and learned that it cropped up everywhere.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Later on, my hobby was electronics. When I left school, obviously I was
|
|
going to do something in maths, science and/or engineering. Emanuel school
|
|
was programmed to send people to Oxford, where the subjects are very narrow.
|
|
I took physics thinking it would be a sort of compromise between maths and
|
|
electronics, theory and practice. It turned out not to be that, but to be
|
|
something special and wonderful in itself. Physics was fun, and in fact a
|
|
good preparation for creating a global system. In physics, you learn to think
|
|
up some simple mathematical rule on a microscopic scale, which when scaled
|
|
will explain the macroscopic behavior. On the Internet, we try to dream up
|
|
computer protocols which when extrapolated to the macroscopic will produce an
|
|
information space with properties we would like.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: Why didn't you stay on to do a PhD in physics?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: After undergraduate physics, you have a reasonable training in logical
|
|
thought and common sense, an ounce of philosophy and not enough maths to
|
|
study physics. I didn't meet anyone who was actually doing physics research
|
|
at the postgrad level and was really excited about it. I might have been more
|
|
tempted to take a PhD if I had had a role model who did have that
|
|
excitement.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>What seemed much more exciting was the possibility of that electronic
|
|
hobby really taking off. The microprocessor was just hitting the world. I got
|
|
an early M6800 evaluation kit, and built myself a rack-based 8-bit system. I
|
|
had already while in college slowly put together a display unit out of an old
|
|
TV, bits of TTL logic and junk from the Tottenham Court Road. I joined
|
|
Plessey Data Systems: of the telecom companies doing the "milk round"
|
|
interviews the Poole (Dorset) site won hands down in terms of the sea and the
|
|
countryside!</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Those who got into designing microprocessor hardware and software then
|
|
rode the crest of the wave of the deployment of microprocessor technology.
|
|
Compared with TTL, a microprocessor gave one that feeling of unbounded
|
|
opportunity which had everyone excited. Later, the thought of building an
|
|
abstract information space on top of it all had the same sort of kick.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p></p>
|
|
|
|
<p></p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="standards">W3C and standards, 1996</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p><em>Q: What role does the </em><a href="/"><em>W3C</em></a><em> play in
|
|
setting standards?</em></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: (1996) W3C's mission is to realize the full potential of the web, by
|
|
bringing its members and others together in a neutral forum. The W3C has to
|
|
move rapidly (time measured in "web years" = 2.6 months) so it cannot afford
|
|
to have a traditional Standards process. What has happened to date has been
|
|
that W3C has, by providing a neutral forum and facilitation, and also with
|
|
the help of its technically astute staff, got a consensus among the
|
|
developers about a way to go. Then, this has been all that has been needed:
|
|
once a common specification has been prepared and a general consensus among
|
|
the experts is seen, companies have been running with that ball. The
|
|
specifications have become de facto standards. This has happened with for
|
|
example HTML TABLES, and PICS. Now in fact we have decided to start using not
|
|
a full standards process, but a process of formal review by the W3C
|
|
membership, in order to draw attention to specifications, and to cement their
|
|
status a little. After review by members, the specifications will be known as
|
|
W3C process.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>(See <a href="../../Consortium/Process">process of review</a>)</p>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q:What do you make of the branding attempt of companies, by putting
|
|
little icons on their home pages saying, "best when viewed with Microsoft
|
|
Explorer, or Navigator?"</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: This comes from an anxiousness to use the latest proprietary features
|
|
which have not been agreed by all companies. It is done either by those who
|
|
have an interest in pushing a particular company, or it is done by those who
|
|
are anxious to take the community back to the dark ages of computing when a
|
|
floppy from a PC wouldn't read on a Mac, and a Wordstar document wouldn't
|
|
read in Word Perfect, or an EBCDIC file wouldn't read on an ASCII machine.
|
|
It's fine for individuals whose work is going to be transient and who aren't
|
|
worried about being read by anyone.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>However, corporate IT strategists should think very carefully about
|
|
committing to the use of features which will bind them into the control of
|
|
any one company. The web has exploded because it is open. It has developed so
|
|
rapidly because the creative forces of thousands of companies are building on
|
|
the same platform. Binding oneself to one company means one is limiting one's
|
|
future to the innovations that one company can provide.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: What role do standards play in today's hyper competitive, and
|
|
fast-changing marketplace?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: Common specifications are essential. This competition, which is a great
|
|
force toward innovation, would not be happening if it were not building on a
|
|
base of HTTP, URL and HTML standards. These forces are strong. They are the
|
|
forces which, by their threat to tear the web apart into fragmented
|
|
incompatible pieces, force companies toward common specifications.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q:Is it overly ambitious to think standards can be set and adhered to?
|
|
Are they a relic of a kinder, gentler era?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: Do you think that incompatibility, the impossibility of transferring
|
|
information between different machines, companies, operating systems,
|
|
applications, was "kinder, gentler"? It was a harsh, frustrating era. The Web
|
|
has brought a kindness and gentleness for users, a confidence in technology
|
|
which is a balm for IT departments everywhere. It has bought new hope. As a
|
|
result, great things are happening very fast. So this is a faster, more
|
|
exciting era.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Companies know that it is only interesting to compete over one feature
|
|
until everyone can do it. After that, that feature becomes part of the base,
|
|
and everyone wants to do it in one, standard, way. The smart companies are
|
|
competing on the implementations: the many other aspects such as
|
|
functionality, speed, ease of use and support which differentiate
|
|
products.</p>
|
|
<address>
|
|
June 96
|
|
</address>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="Machinery">Machinery</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>Q: <i>What sort of computer do you use?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: (2002) A titanium G4 Powerbook running OS X and under X11 fink
|
|
-installed stuff including Amaya. I use a Nokia bluetooth 3670 tri-band GSM
|
|
phone which has a low-res camera. The OS X operating system is very similar
|
|
to the NeXTStep operating system on which I developed the WorldWideWeb
|
|
program originally.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p></p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="Cailliau">Robert Cailliau's role</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>Robert Cailliau also worked at CERN, in a different division from me.
|
|
He was the first convert to the web technology after Mike Sendall who
|
|
originally let me start the project.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<p>Robert put in huge amounts of time and effort into the WWW
|
|
project.
|
|
He tried to get official funding for it from CERN.
|
|
He looked for students who might be interested in
|
|
working on it, and found several, some of whom, like Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and
|
|
Ari Luotonen, became famous
|
|
names in later WWW history.
|
|
He would organize the details with management, and I would
|
|
technically supervise, though our offices were several minutes walk
|
|
away across the site.
|
|
(If CERN had not been an international site,
|
|
mine would have been on French soil and his on Swiss,
|
|
so we would have had to show our passports each time!)
|
|
</p><p>
|
|
Some commentators suggest that Robert co-invented the WWW.
|
|
To set this straight, he did not invent it.
|
|
It wasn't his idea.
|
|
He did not write the specifications for UDIs (later to be URLs, then URIs),
|
|
or for HTML, the hypertext language, nor HTTP, the protocol, or the code
|
|
of the original implementation.
|
|
More than a year after my original proposal (March 1989), while I was
|
|
working on the code, he wrote a proposal to CERN proposing some staff be
|
|
allocated to the project.
|
|
This was a brave thing to do, as CERN was
|
|
always chronically short of manpower for the huge challenges it had taken on.
|
|
So Robert put himself out there to claim that effort on WWW was worth it.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<p>
|
|
He pushed CERN's management, also, for them to give the WWW technology away
|
|
without royalties. This took 18 months, and a lot of nagging at the directorate level.
|
|
This was hugely important for the future of the WWW.
|
|
<p/>
|
|
<p>One cannot catalog in one place all the many many things Robert has done for the Web.
|
|
One thing which stands out was his organizing of the first WWW conference, at CERN,
|
|
after a short tussle with NCSA as to who should hold the first.
|
|
Since then Robert was for many years intimately involved wit the International
|
|
WWW Conference series.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<p>That's not to say either that Robert did not have a technical side.
|
|
His negotiating for internet access from a local university, and soldering up
|
|
of the modem so that we could demonstrate the WWW at the
|
|
Hypertext conference in San Antonio was a great illustration of his spirit.
|
|
He also later wrote a browser for the Mac, his favorite platform.
|
|
(Robert had passion for user interfaces which people could actually use,
|
|
and so the Mac and the Web both appealed). The browser, called Samba,
|
|
was an attempt to port the design of the original WWW browser,
|
|
which I wrote on the NeXT machine,
|
|
onto the Mac platform, but
|
|
was not ready before NCSA brought out the Mac version of Mosaic, which eclipsed it.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<p>Robert continued to speak on the subject of the web, promoting it,
|
|
explaining it, and defending it, for many years, and still does, though he
|
|
has retired from CERN and the conference committee.
|
|
The early days of the web were very hand-to-mouth.
|
|
So many things to do, such a delicate flame to kep alive.
|
|
Without Robert's energy and passion for it I cannot imagine that
|
|
it could have taken off as it did.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<h2><a name="cernoffice">Where exactly did you work at CERN?</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>
|
|
I wrote the proposal, and developed the code in CERN Building 31.
|
|
I was on the second (in the european sense) floor, if you come out of the elevator
|
|
(a very slow freight elevator at the time anyway) and turn immediately right
|
|
you would then walk into one of the two offices I inhabited.
|
|
The two offices (which of course may have been rearranged since then)
|
|
were different sizes: the one to the left (a gentle R turn out of the elevator)
|
|
benefitted from extra length as it was by neither staircase nor elevator.
|
|
The one to the right (or a sharp R turn out of the elevator) was shorter
|
|
and the one I started in. I shared it for a long time with Claude Bizeau.
|
|
I think I wrote the 1989 memo there.
|
|
</p><p>
|
|
|
|
When I actually started work coding up the WWW code in September
|
|
1990, I moved into the larger office. That is where I had the NeXT machine,
|
|
as I remember it.
|
|
</p><p>
|
|
The second floor had pale grey linoleum, the first floor, where Peggie Rimmer had her office, had red lino; the third floor had pale yellow lino. The ground floor had I think green lino.
|
|
Also on the second floor was the Documentation et DonnŽes, later Computing and Networking, HQ with David Williams at one point heading it up.
|
|
|
|
</p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="Spelling">Spelling of WWW</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: How in fact do you spell World Wide Web?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym is
|
|
three separate "W"s. There are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in some
|
|
places been spelled with a hyphen but the official way is without. Yes, I
|
|
know that "worldwide" is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web is
|
|
three words.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>I use "Web" with a capital W to indicate that it is an abbreviation for
|
|
"World Wide Web". Hence, "What a tangled web he wove on his Web site!".</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Often, WWW is written and read as W3, which is quicker to say. In
|
|
particular, the World Wide Web consortium is W3C, <b>never</b> WWWC.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: Why did you call it WWW?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: Looking for a name for a global hypertext system, an essential element
|
|
I wanted to stress was its decentralized form allowing anything to link to
|
|
anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to
|
|
be global of course. (I had noticed that projects find it useful to have a
|
|
signature letter, as the Zebra project at CERN which started all its
|
|
variables with "Z". In fact by the time I had decided on WWW, I had written
|
|
enough code using global variables starting with "HT" for hypertext that W
|
|
wasn't used for that.). Alternatives I considered were "Mine of information"
|
|
("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste) and "The Information Mine ("Tim", even more
|
|
egocentric!), and "Information Mesh" (too like "Mess" though its ability to
|
|
describe a mess was a requirement!). Karen Sollins at MIT now has a Mesh
|
|
project.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h2 id="etc">Why the //, #, etc?</h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>(2000/09) When I was designing the Web, I tried to use forms which people
|
|
would recognize from elsewhere.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p><em>Q: What is the history of the //?</em></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: I wanted the syntax of the URI to separate the bit which the web
|
|
browser has to know about (www.example.com) from the rest (the opaque string
|
|
which is blindly requested by the client from the server). Within the rest of
|
|
the URI, slashes (/) were the clear choice to separate parts of a
|
|
hierarchical system, and I wanted to be able to make a link without having to
|
|
know the name of the service (www.example.com) which was publishing the data.
|
|
The relative URI syntax is just unix pathname syntax reused without apology.
|
|
Anyone who had used unix would find it quite obvious. Then I needed an
|
|
extension to add the service name (hostname). In fact this was similar to the
|
|
problem the Apollo domain system had had when they created a network file
|
|
system. They had extended the filename syntax to allow
|
|
//computername/file/path/as/usual. So I just copied Apollo. Apollo was a
|
|
brand of unix workstation. (The Apollo folks, who invented domain and
|
|
Apollo's Remote procedure call system later I think went largely to
|
|
Microsoft, and rumor has it that much of Microsoft's RPC system was).</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy. I would like
|
|
http://www.example.com/foo/bar/baz to be just written
|
|
http:com/example/foo/bar/baz where the client would figure out that
|
|
www.example.com existed and was the server to contact. But it is too late
|
|
now. It turned out the shorthand "//www.example.com/foo/bar/baz" is rarely
|
|
used and so we could dispense with the "//".</p>
|
|
|
|
<p><em>Q: What about the "#"?</em></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: So, I needed something to separate the document (resource) from the
|
|
thing (fragment) within that document (or view of that document). In a snail
|
|
mail address in the US at least, it is common to use the number sign for an
|
|
apartment number or suite number within a building. So 12 Acacia Av #12 means
|
|
"The building at 12 Acacia Av, and then within that the unit known numbered
|
|
12". It seemed to be a natural character for the task. Now,
|
|
http://www.example.com/foo#bar means "Within resource
|
|
http://www.example.com/foo, the particular view of it known as bar".</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>It turned out later that in fact another hypertext project of some sort in
|
|
IBM, and Doug Englebart's NLS system had both independently use "#" for this
|
|
purpose. So there is something to choosing a character for the way people
|
|
think of it.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Ray Tomlinson, who invented email, tells a similar story of many years
|
|
earlier choosing the "@" for email - it made linguistic sense, as "at" was
|
|
the english preposition which typically connects a person and their address.
|
|
Hence ray@example.com and so on.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="browser">What were the first WWW browsers?</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<h4>WorldWideWeb</h4>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: I wrote in 1990 the first GUI browser, and called it
|
|
"<i>WorldWideWeb</i>". It ran on the NeXT computer. (I much later renamed the
|
|
application <i>Nexus</i> to avoid confusion between the first client and the
|
|
abstract space itself).</p>
|
|
<ul>
|
|
<li><a
|
|
href="../../../History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2_24c.gif">Screenshot
|
|
of WorldWideWeb</a> taken for a CACM article. <i>By this time it had
|
|
color and inline images.The original 1990 version 1.0 would have looked
|
|
identical except the book icon and the CERN icon would have been in
|
|
separate windows - and the whole thing (like NeXT at the time) would have
|
|
been in gray scale! The screen shot shows me making a link from "Atlas"
|
|
in a list of experiments to some marked page. Look - no typing URLS, no
|
|
<angle brackets></i>!</li>
|
|
</ul>
|
|
|
|
<p>WorldWideWeb was a graphical point-and-click browser with mode-free
|
|
editing and link creation. It used style sheets, and multiple fonts, sizes,
|
|
and justification styles. It would download and display linked images,
|
|
diagrams, sounds animations and movies from anything in the large NeXTStep
|
|
standard repertoire.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>(Some have asked for pointers to the source code. I have found an <a
|
|
href="/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation">archive directory</a> including
|
|
the <a
|
|
href="/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/HyperText.m">HyperText.m</a>
|
|
module which was the basis for the hypertext functionality. This code, like
|
|
all my WWW code and later W3C has always been publicly available. This
|
|
archive has the code, though the libwww code modules are soft links which no
|
|
longer work. I haven't tried recompiling and linking it for years - so it is
|
|
probably of historical interest only)</p>
|
|
<ul>
|
|
<li><a href="WorldWideWeb">More about the WorldWideWeb application</a>
|
|
<a></a></li>
|
|
</ul>
|
|
|
|
<h4>Viola</h4>
|
|
|
|
<p>Pei Wei, student at U.C. Berkeley (not Stanford, as incorrectly reported
|
|
earlier in a typo here), then wrote <em>ViolaWWW</em> for unix, based on his
|
|
<em>Viola</em> language; some students at Helsinki University of Technology
|
|
wrote "Erwise" for unix; and Tony Johnson of SLAC wrote "Midas" for unix. Pei
|
|
Wei has passed though history unnoticed among others whose work is not
|
|
mentioned in the histories, even though there was a year or so when Viola was
|
|
the best way to browse the web, was the engine driving the installation of
|
|
new servers, and the recommended browser at CERN for example.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Many people, incidentally, saw the Web for the first time by telnetting
|
|
into <tt>info.CERN.ch</tt>, which gave them a crude but functional line mode
|
|
interface. This was the second browser, a text-based browser, called the
|
|
"line mode" browser, or "www", and written by CERN student Nicola Pellow.
|
|
Many people imagined that that was all there was to the web. As one
|
|
journalist wrote "The Web is a way of finding information by typing numbers"
|
|
as links were numbered on the page. It was only in the community of people
|
|
who use NeXT computers that the Web could be seen as a point-and-click space
|
|
of hypertext.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="Mosaic">Where does Mosaic fit in?</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: As I understand it, Marc Andreessen at NCSA was shown ViolaWWW by a
|
|
colleague (David Thompson?) at NCSA. Marc downloaded Midas and tried it out.
|
|
He and Eric Bina then wrote their own browser for unix from scratch. Later,
|
|
several other folks at NCSA joined the team to port the idea to Mac and PC.
|
|
As they did, Tom Bruce at Cornell was writing "Cello" for the PC which came
|
|
out neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Marc and Eric did a number of very important things. They made a browser
|
|
which was easy to install and use. They were the first one to get inline
|
|
images working - to that point browsers had had varieties of fonts and
|
|
colors, but pictures were displayed in separate windows. This made web pages
|
|
much sexier. Most importantly, Marc followed up his and Eric's coding with
|
|
very fast 24hr customer support, really addressing what it took to make the
|
|
app easy and natural to use, and trivial to install. Other apps had other
|
|
things going for them. Viola, for example, was more advanced in many ways,
|
|
with downloaded applets and animations way back then - very like HotJava was
|
|
later. But Mosaic was the easiest step onto the Web for a beginner, and so
|
|
was a critical element of the Web explosion.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Marc marketed Mosaic hard on the net, and NCSA hard elsewhere, trying hard
|
|
to brand the WWW and "Mosaic": "I saw it on Mosaic" etc. When Marc and Jim
|
|
Clark first started their start-up they first capitalized on the Mosaic
|
|
brand, but NCSA fought for it and won. When the "Netscape" brand appeared,
|
|
people realized the difference between the general "World Wide Web"concept
|
|
and specific software.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="Influences">Start of the web: Influences</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q. Have your first ideas in regard to the Web been influenced by any
|
|
specific work or published paper like Vanevar Bush´s "As we my think",
|
|
a publication of Doug Engelbart or Ted Nelson?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A. There wasn't a direct line. I did come across Ted's work while I was
|
|
working on the WWW -- after my "Enquire" program (1980) but during my reading
|
|
up on hypertext - probably between March 89 and September 1990. Not sure.. Of
|
|
course by 1989 there was hypertext as a common word, hypertext help
|
|
everywhere, so Ted's basic idea had been (sort of) implemented and I came
|
|
across it though many indirect routes.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>I came across Ted's name first of course. Then I ordered "Literary
|
|
Machines", and I remember I was late paying him as he didn't take credit
|
|
cards or Swiss cheques - I paid him in August 1992, in cash, in person in
|
|
Sausolito.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>I came across Vannevar Bush's article first in the documentation of
|
|
Digital Equipment Corporation's "Memex" project which became "Linkworks" for
|
|
VMS. I don't remember when that came out. Great paper.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Doug Englebart's work was the closest to the Web design -- when I saw that
|
|
the first time I was amazed. He had even used the hash sign as a delimiter
|
|
for the address within a document (I guess like me by analogy with an
|
|
apartment number). Doug's stuff is unbelievable. You have best to see the
|
|
video of him demonstrating it or his demo of a recent smalltalk
|
|
re-implementation. I saw the latter at the Edinburg Hypertext conference ECHT
|
|
94.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: Any people who personally helped you get to where you are
|
|
today?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: I think the list would be too long to mention. Everyone who was fun and
|
|
encouraging, starting with my parents. On the professional side, here are a
|
|
few:</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>The Maths teacher at Emanuel, Frank Grundy, who conveyed the excitement of
|
|
the subject with a twinkle of his eye, could make numerical approximations in
|
|
his head faster than we could work it out longhand, and would throw in a
|
|
teaser question into his conversation to puzzle anyone who thought they had
|
|
figured the subject out. And Daffy Pennel who also couldn't contain his
|
|
excitement for Chemistry and anything related to it.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Unlike most people at Oxford I had one tutor for almost all the work. John
|
|
Moffat has a vary rare talent for being able to understand not only the
|
|
physics itself, but also my tangled misguided attempts at it, and then
|
|
showing me in my terms using my strange symbols and vocabulary where I had
|
|
gone wrong. Many people can only explain the world from their own point of
|
|
view.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>At CERN, I was recruited by Peggie Rimmer who taught me, among other
|
|
things, how to write a standards document. Ben Segal was a mentor for my RPC
|
|
project at CERN, and was a sole evangelist for Internet protocols at CERN
|
|
long before they were adopted. Ben gave me a lot of moral support in the
|
|
later WWW days too. A few years later, Mike Sendall was my boss who has a
|
|
great combination of human warmth and technical depth, and actually allowed
|
|
me unofficially to write the WWW programs. And then everyone across the
|
|
Internet who thought the Web was a neat idea and worked on it after hours
|
|
actually built it.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p></p>
|
|
|
|
<h2>On collaboration and automatability, Sept 95</h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>The web today is a medium for communication between people, using
|
|
computers as a largely invisible part of the infrastructure. One of the
|
|
long-term goals of the consortium is "Automatability", the ability for
|
|
computers to make some sense of the information and so help us in our task.
|
|
It has been the goal of mankind for so long that machines should help us in
|
|
more useful ways than they do at present, help us solve some of those human
|
|
problems. Maybe this is one of the many ideas (like hypertext) which the
|
|
web's great scale will allow to work where it did not achieve critical mass
|
|
on a small scale before. So there are groups looking at a web of knowledge
|
|
representation. It could be that some scientific field will be the first to
|
|
be sufficiently disciplined to input its data not just as cool hypertext, but
|
|
in a machine-readable form, allowing programs to wander the globe analyzing
|
|
and surmising.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>The W3 Consortium started to address this goal with its recent workshop on
|
|
Collaboration on the Web. The ability of machines to process data on the web
|
|
for scientific purposes such as checking a scientist's private experimental
|
|
data against public databases, require databases to be available not only in
|
|
a raw machine-readable form, but also labelled in a machine readable way as
|
|
to what they are.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>The knowledge engineering field has to learn how to be global, and the web
|
|
has to learn knowledge engineering, but in the end this might be a way in
|
|
which again the scientific field leads the world into something very
|
|
powerful, and a new paradigm shift.</p>
|
|
|
|
<h2>March 95</h2>
|
|
|
|
<p><em>Q: How did you come to arrive at the idea of WWW?</em></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: I arrived at the web because the "Enquire" (E not I) program -- short
|
|
for Enquire Within Upon Everything, named after a Victorian book of that name
|
|
full of all sorts of useful advice about anything -- was something I found
|
|
really useful for keeping track of all the random associations one comes
|
|
across in Real Life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but
|
|
sometimes mine wouldn't. It was very simple but could track those
|
|
associations which would sometimes develop into structure as ideas became
|
|
connected, and different projects become involved with each other.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>I was using Enquire myself, and realized that (a) it would fulfill my
|
|
obligation to the world to describe what I was doing if everyone else could
|
|
get at the data, and (b) it would make it possible for me to check out the
|
|
other projects in the lab which I could chose to use or not if only their
|
|
designers had used Enquire and I had access.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Now, the first version of Enquire allowed you to make links between files
|
|
(on one file system) just as easily as between nodes within one file. (It
|
|
stored many nodes in one database file). The second version, a port from NORD
|
|
to PC then VMS, would not allow external links.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>This proved to be a debilitating problem. To be constrained into database
|
|
enclosures was too boring, not powerful enough. The whole point about
|
|
hypertext was that (unlike most project management and documentation systems)
|
|
it could model a changing morass of relationships which characterized most
|
|
real environments I knew (and certainly CERN). Only allowing links within
|
|
distinct boxes killed that. One had to be able to jump from software
|
|
documentation to a list of people to a phone book to an organizational chart
|
|
to whatever .. as you can with the web today. The test rule was that if I
|
|
persuaded two other projects to use it, and they described their systems with
|
|
it, and then later at any point a module, person etc., in one project used
|
|
something from another project, that you would be able to add the link and
|
|
the two webs would become one with no global change -- no "flag day"
|
|
involving the merging of two databases into one, no scaling problems as the
|
|
number of connected things grew. Hence the W3 design.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>The same lesson applies now to the webs of trust we will be building with
|
|
linked certificates.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>So the requirement was for "external" links to be just as easy to make as
|
|
"internal" links. Which meant that links had to be one way.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>(There was also a requirement that the web should be really easy to add
|
|
links to, but though that was true in the prototype we are only now starting
|
|
to see betas of good commercial web editors now.)</p>
|
|
|
|
<h2>June 94</h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>This was an interview in Internet world by Kris Herbst. His questions are
|
|
his (c) of course. Slightly edited.</p>
|
|
<pre> IW: What did you think of the first WWW'94 conference?<br> <br> TBL: Great! It had a unique atmosphere, as there were people from all<br> walks of life brought together by their excitement about the Web. As it<br> was the first one, they hadn't met before, so it was a bit unique. It was<br> very oversubscribed, as you know, so the next one will have to be a lot<br> bigger.<br> <br> IW: Can you tell us something about your early life, and how those<br> experiences might have influenced you later as you developed WWW?<br> <br> TBL: That's the first time I've been asked to trace WWW history back<br> that far! I was born in London, England. My parents met while<br> developing the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially,<br> and I grew up playing with five-hole paper tape and building<br> computers out of cardboard boxes. Could that have been an influence?<br> Later on I studied physics as a kind of compromise between<br> mathematics and engineering. As it turned out, it wasn't that<br> compromise, but it was something special in its own right. Nevertheless,<br> afterward I went straight into the IT industry where more things<br> seemed to be happening. So I can't really call myself a physicist.<br> But physicists spend a lot of time trying to relate macroscopic behavior<br> of systems to microscopic laws, and that is the essence of the design of<br> scalable systems. So physics was probably an influence.<br> <br> IW: What led you to conceive the WWW?<br> <br> TBL: I dabbled with a number of programs representing information in<br> a brain-like way. Some of the earlier programs were too abstract and led<br> to hopelessly undebuggable tangles. One more practical program was a<br> hypertext notebook I made for my own personal use when I arrived at<br> CERN. I found I needed it just to keep track of the -- how shall I say --<br> flexible? creative? -- way new parts of the system, people and modules<br> were added on and connected together. The project I'd worked on just<br> before starting WWW was a real-time remote procedure call, so that<br> gave me some networking background. Image Computer Systems did a<br> lot of work with text processing and communications -- I was a director<br> before coming to CERN. <br> <br> IW: What elements in your background or character helped you to<br> conceive WWW as a way to keep track of what was happening at<br> CERN? <br> <br> TBL: Elements of character?! Anyone who has lost track of time when<br> using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make<br> dreams come true, and the tendency to miss lunch. The former two<br> probably helped. I think they are called Attention Deficiency Disorder<br> now. ;-)<br> <br> IW: Do you have some favorite Web sites for browsing?<br> <br> TBL: (Sigh) I wish I did, but I hardly spend any time browsing.<br> Historically, I appreciate the people who were first and showed others<br> how things could be -- Franz Hoesel's Vatican Library, of course, Steve<br> Putz's map server, lots more.<br> <br> IW: How do you feel about the fact that WWW promises to generate<br> large amounts of money for some persons?<br> <br> TBL: If it's good, people will want to buy it, and money is they way<br> they vote on what they want. I believe that system is the best one we<br> have, so if it's right, sure people are going to make money. People will<br> make money building software, selling information, and more<br> importantly doing all kinds of "real" business, which happens to work<br> much better because the Web is there to make their work easier.<br> The web is like paper. It doesn't constrain what you use it for:<br> you have to be able to use it for all of the information flow of<br> normal life.<br> My priority is to see it develop and evolve in a<br> way which will hold us in good stead for a long future.<br> If I, and CERN, hadn't had that attitude,<br> there probably wouldn't be a web now.<br> <br> Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes<br> proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would<br> make me unhappy.<br> </pre>
|
|
|
|
<h2>More obscure questions...</h2>
|
|
|
|
<h3>Rendition of links</h3>
|
|
|
|
<p><i>Q: I´m a student of visual communications and asked myself why links
|
|
are blue. I found some answers that might be, for example blue is a color of
|
|
learning, but I´m not sure what is right. Is there any reason, why links are
|
|
colored blue ?</i></p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links:
|
|
it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for
|
|
the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis
|
|
form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went
|
|
color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the
|
|
defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course
|
|
with <a href="../../StyleSheets/Overview.html">CSS</a> style sheets. There
|
|
are many examples of style sheets which use different colors.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility
|
|
least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and
|
|
because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in
|
|
many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which
|
|
had a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the link
|
|
with a square apparently raised area.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p></p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="your">Why is your email address on my screen?</a></h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>Q: I get on my connection screen something like</p>
|
|
<pre>Keyword Decimal Description References<br> ------- ------- ----------- ---------- <br>http 80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP<br>http 80/udp World Wide Web HTTP <br>www 80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP<br>www 80/udp World Wide Web HTTP www-http<br>80/tcp World Wide Web HTTP www-http<br>80/udp World Wide Web HTTP # Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@W3.org></pre>
|
|
|
|
<p>Who are you and why are you there?</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: Your screen is showing you a list of services on the Internet. Service
|
|
80, for example, is HTTP, the protocol which allows a web server and client
|
|
to talk to each other. A web client opens a TCP connection to a port number
|
|
80 on the server. It just happened that I designed HTTP and asked for the
|
|
port number to be assigned for computers everywhere to be able to use for the
|
|
web. So someone left my name and email against the entry at the time for the
|
|
record. The hash (#) tells your computer not to take any notice of that line.
|
|
It is just historical. I am not hacking your computer!</p>
|
|
|
|
<p></p>
|
|
|
|
<h2><a name="tell">Can you tell me more about your personal li</a>fe?</h2>
|
|
|
|
<p>A: No, I can't - sorry. I like to keep work and personal life separate.
|
|
What is on the web on this page and my home page is all there is. Please do
|
|
not email me asking for more information for school projects, etc. Thank you
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for your understanding.</p>
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<p></p>
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<hr>
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<address>
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<a href="/TBL_Disclaimer.html">TimBL</a>
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