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A Parent's View of the World Wide Web as It Reaches Adolescence

Steve Lohr
NY Times 9/20/99


Every young Internet millionaire owes a debt to Tim Berners-Lee, the
creator of the World Wide Web. An Oxford-educated physicist, he
stitched together the core software of the multimedia branch of the
Internet while working in the shadow of the Swiss Alps at the CERN
physics laboratory outside Geneva nearly a decade ago. 

Yet perhaps more important is what Berners-Lee did after he designed
the Web. He has served as a kind of parental guardian of his
creation, working tirelessly to insure that as much as possible the
Web remains a public mass-medium in cyberspace, an information
thoroughfare that is open to all, Rolls Royces and Rollerbladers
alike. 

That was his original vision for the Web -- a universal medium for
sharing information based on freely available technology instead of
being controlled by one or a few powerful companies. 

For the past five years, Berners-Lee has pursued that vision as the
director of the World Wide Web Consortium, whose mission is to make
sure that the fundamental software for identifying and sharing
information on the Web is a public standard. Keeping the Web open,
of course, has fueled its phenomenal growth, which in turn has
created a much larger market for commercial exploitation. 

So it is one of the notable ironies of Net history: Because
Berners-Lee chose not to cash in on his invention, he has helped
expand the business opportunities for America Online, Amazon, Ebay,
Yahoo and every eager start-up sprinting to join the dot-com gold
rush. 

In a new book being shipped to bookstores this week, Berners-Lee
expresses some irritation at being asked -- especially by incredulous
Americans -- why he didn't go for the Internet gold. 

"What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person's value
depends on how important and financially successful they are, and
that that is measured in terms of money," he states in "Weaving the
Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web
By Its Inventor" (Harper San Francisco). The book was written by
Berners-Lee with Mark Fishetti, a freelance writer. 

"That suggests disrespect," Berners-Lee adds, "for the researchers
across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and
technology." 

Still, Berners-Lee has no hair-shirt aversion for business. He writes
that when leaving CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics,
in early 1994 he considered "starting a company with the working name
of Websoft, to do much the same as Netscape," whose point-and-click
browser software made the Web easily accessible. 

Yet that entrepreneurial flirtation was a brief one, and by his own
account, it seems clear that Berners-Lee's instincts and abilities
lay elsewhere. He is the son of two English mathematicians, Conway
Berners-Lee and Mary Lee, who were computing pioneers in their own
right, having worked on a team that designed one of the world's first
commercial stored-program computers in the early 1950s. Indeed, in
his book, Berners-Lee describes the most "tempting option" in the
corporate world was to join "the research group of a large
benevolent company." 

He did talk to several big companies about joining their research
labs, but he eventually decided to go to the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science and found the World
Wide Web Consortium. 

"I wanted to see the Web proliferate, not sink my life's hours into
worrying over a product release," Berners-Lee writes. 

At the consortium, he admits, he has restraints as well -- he must
strive to be a neutral diplomat in standards debates among members
like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Oracle that are often at
odds in the marketplace. 

Yet the consortium, Berners-Lee decided, was the right place for him.
"I'd be free," he writes of his decision, "to really think about what
was right for the world, as opposed to what would be best for one
commercial interest." 

"Weaving the Web" is a book in two parts. The first is essentially a
narrative of creation, while the second is Berners-Lee's view of the
Web's future. 

His description of designing the Web underlines how much innovation
is a step-by-step process, using the work of others and putting
those building blocks together in new ways. In the case of the Web,
the key ingredients were hypertext for linking text in a nonlinear
format and the Internet. 

"I happened to come along with time, and the right interest and
inclination, after hypertext and the Internet had come of age,"
Berners-Lee writes. "The task left to me was to marry them together."

He came up with the software standards for addressing, linking and
transferring multimedia documents over the Internet. They have the
shorthand names that are second-nature to computer enthusiasts and
even familiar to, if little understood by, millions of Web surfers:
URL's (uniform resource locators), HTTP (hypertext transfer
protocol) and HTML (hypertext mark-up language). 

If Berners-Lee seems matter-of-fact about his work, much of the
computer science community was dismissive when they first saw it. 

"He took a very simple approach," Jim Gray, a leading computer
scientist at Microsoft Research, recalled in an interview. "It is
fair to say that everyone who saw it thought nothing of it. Very
simple, very minimal, anyone could have done it. No big deal. 

"Well," Gray continued, "everyone was wrong and no one else did it
-- Tim did it." 

Berners-Lee's breakthrough, apparently, is proof of the adage that
genius is a fresh approach to the obvious. "I like that," Berners-Lee
said last week in an interview. "The Web is obvious, after the fact."

Critical to the creative process, in his view, is placing a good
mind in an environment rich in the information that might be useful
in solving a problem -- a "Web of information," he inevitably calls
it. 

"Creativity is a Web-like process, it's nonlinear but not random
either," he said. "It requires ideas just floating -- that is the
state in which the mind can jiggle them into an insight." 

Berners-Lee believes that the next stage of the Web, if properly
handled, holds the promise of greatly increasing the creative
productivity of groups, corporations and of society in general.
Whether that potential can be attained is an uncertainty that hinges,
he insists, on the evolution of the new technical standards that the
hundreds of members of the Web consortium are working to develop and
refine. 

The Web's first stage, based on HTML, can be thought of as focused
on addressing and presenting documents. The stage just beginning to
unfold, based on XML (extensible mark-up language) and refinements
like RDF (resource description framework), allows the data inside
documents to be identified with programming "tags." 

Today, a user has to know or find the address of a Web document that
contains information he or she wants. But increasingly, the Web
should become far more "intelligent" as small programs sometimes
called "logic engines" will be able to find the useful data on areas
of intellectual inquiry -- finding some facet of Chaucer studies for
Ph.D. research, for example, or corporate projects like mapping the
relationships and dependencies among people, rivals and suppliers in
an industry for competitive analysis.

The next stage of Web technical standards essentially enables
computers to talk to each other, so that they do routine and
repetitive work involved in everything from homework to shopping. And
that leaves people with more time and energy for doing the more
creative tasks. The Web, in short, has the capacity to become a much
more intelligent information infrastructure. 

"Now, we're writing documents that contain logic," Berners-Lee
explained. "It's a huge step forward toward a semantic Web, which
handles the meaning of data." 

Yet what Berners-Lee calls the "XML revolution," he writes, is "both
a boon and a threat to the Web dream." The danger, he says, is a
Balkanization of the Web -- if companies create their own XML tags
that cannot be read by everyone else. If that were to happen, it
would no longer be a universal medium of sharing information. 

The first line of defense against the threat, Berners-Lee says, is
his consortium, as the institutional guardian of the "technical
integrity of the Web" -- keeping the standards open. 

Which is why, he says, he plans to stay at MIT for the next several
years. "It is so important that we get this right that I want to be
there and throw my weight," he said. 

His creation is still young. And Berners-Lee views it with a mixture
of parental pride and concern, and he is not yet willing to let it go
unsupervised. "I think of the Web as an adolescent," he said. "It
has started realizing it has a new-found power. No one knows if it
knows how to use it responsibly. And maturity is a long way off." 

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company 











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