It’s not everyday you sit less than 50 feet away from the inventor of the web. Yes, inventor of the WORLD WIDE WEB, the platform we use to do pretty much everything now days. Tim Berners-Lee is at SXSW to discuss the importance of the open web during the panel Open Web Platforms: Hopes and Fears.
The question asked by the announcer ignited applause and cheers from the audience as Berners-Lee took the stage. What would the World Wide Web be like if it had been trademarked?
In the early 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee began the development of the World Wide Web by defining HTML, URLs and HTTP. He built URLS as an open platform to allow people to put whatever they wanted out there. “The URL is fundamental, then http and then html as a language you can use as you like,” he explained.
“Thinking about the open web platform I found myself thinking about different computer languages. I began writing code for the Next box even though very few people bought next machines,” said Berners-Lee; who credits the creation of the World Wide Web to this machine
For 20 years, it has been Berners-Lee’s job to get people to use open platforms. “All these years I have talked about different platforms and we have now come a long way.” Even though there has been great progression, the real goal of the web has not come true, to have a reading and writing collaboration among all platforms.
We use the internet for a variety of reasons; research, storage, communication etc. Berners-Lee even recognized the latest fad of cat memes, before stressing what is important when building online. “The cats are great but I hope that the Internet you build will encourage openness and democracies across cultures.” In fact, keeping the internet open is now critical more than ever before. The main threat in today’s culture comes from the fact that information coming from the internet can be blocked, removing the openness Berners-Lee intended.
During his discussion Berners-Lee also made a few key points:
- HTML is declarative, it’s safe and it can be used for a lot of different things.
- Javascript is the basis for things to come.
- There is a rule based system. If you write something that will execute you have to write a set of rules that are declarative. When you are writing rules you are working at the right level of expressing knowledge.
