Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of Sir Tim Berners-Lee‘s proposal for the entity we all know and love, called the World Wide Web.
From the Nov. 12, 1990 (for the full text, click here) –
HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.
Here’s a bit about Sir Tim from the World Wide Web Foundation –
Having invented the Web in 1989 while working at CERN and subsequently working to ensure it was made freely available to all, Berners-Lee is now dedicated to enhancing and protecting the Web’s future. He is a Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, which seeks to ensure the Web serves humanity by establishing it as a global public good and a basic right. He is also Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a global Web standards organization he founded in 1994 to lead the Web to its full potential. In 2012 he co-founded the Open Data Institute (ODI) which advocates for Open Data in the UK and globally. Sir Tim has advised a number of governments and corporations on ongoing digital strategies. A graduate of Oxford University, Sir Tim presently holds academic posts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab), (USA) and the University of Southampton (UK.)
I also found a cool little article on Time, with four fun facts about Sir Tim, including this one –
2. Those 404 “Website Not Found” pages are a necessary evil. Earlier hypertext arrangements kept a record of every single link in the system to avoid “dangling links” — links pointing to nothing. But creating the Web at scale meant users would have to be able to delete documents without telling every single other user about the deletion, even if that document was being linked to from elsewhere. Berners-Lee “realized that this dangling-link thing may be a problem, but you have to accept it.”
Happy birthday, WWW! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some cat videos to watch. *grin*
Yes. I think of it as both a blessing and a curse, frankly. There are things I miss about the world before the WWW. But, generally, I love my internet. 😉
Yeah, there are times that I long for the simpler days, but I agree – I love my internet too. Hey, the original title of my blog was, “Confessions of an Internet G33k” after all. 😀
Awesome! Always interning to read the history of things that now seem inevitable – and realize how everything could have been different.
Thanks, Stephanie!