“The dream of the Web is of a common information space on which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext can point to anything, be it personal, local, or global... ”
Tim Berners–Lee
Web Visionary
Tim Berners-Lee Is directing the future of the WWW.
Stop and ask the average person on the street who Tim Berners-Lee is and I guarantee that you would be greeted with blank stares most of the time. Now, stop and ask the same person if they have ever heard of the World Wide Web you will be greeted with faces of obvious knowledge of such a trivial item. Everyone knows of this thing. The truth is Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW in 1989.
Raised in London by two mathematicians, Berners-Lee had been around computers and electronics for most of his life. He attended Oxford University and graduated with a degree in physics. Discouraged with physics he turned his attentions to computer science where he found his niche. Berners-Lee left England for the Swiss Alps to go work at The European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN). It is here in Switzerland that history was made. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee created a program that he called “WorlDwidEweb”. This became the precursor to the WWW that exists today.
Loosely basing some thoughts he had about the brain being able to store random associations between separate things, Berners-Lee set out to design a program that would do roughly the same thing. Berners-Lee used the Internet as his neural pathways and hypertext to create the links. Simplistically, a hypertext refers to text that can be linked to other text over a network. Today, these links can incorporate the use of sound, pictures, motion and many other media. These links created, for the first time, the ability for the author to link together thoughts, ideas and concepts for the whole world to see and in turn link the world's thoughts and ideas to your own. Berners-Lee said, “The dream of the Web is of a common information space on which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext can point to anything, be it personal, local, or global...” This universality is the key concept for the simple reason that computers don't all speak the same language. In order for this network to work, however, there must be a common code.
In 1994 Berners-Lee formed the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3). The Consortium is an open forum for discussing the future of common protocols and standards on the Web. The Consortium's members include industry leaders like Microsoft, Adobe and Netscape, along with many other industry leaders committed to the functionality of the WWW. WC3 itself does not govern but attempts to find agreement between members with regard to universality. This is no easy task considering the competitiveness of the players. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape's Navigator and a host of other browsers have taken Berners-Lee's open source code HTML and have written their own propriety code that can only be viewed on their browsers. This means certain aspects of a webpage will look different or may not even work when displayed on varying browsers. While all this competition is good for getting some free software, Berners-Lee has said that because everyone started with the same base the Web exploded and without that open source it probably wouldn't have. If Berners-Lee had started his own company when he created the Web and then charged everyone to use it, the Web may not have survived. The simple fact is that these companies are all vying for the biggest slice of the same pie and at the same time the world's slice is getting smaller and smaller. In Berners-Lee's vision what browser you use to view a webpage shouldn't change the content. The Web will only work if people can interact with each other's work regardless of which software is doing the translation.
What's going to happen with the Internet in the coming years? Well according to Tim Berners-Lee quite a lot. The Web according to him is only going to get more refined, more powerful. At WWW7, a international conference about the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee told programmers to look at their work as modular, to see it as just another step in the grand scheme of things. He wants to keep everything open ended so that the same application 200 years from now will be able to read and edit (make better) a webpage from today without having to rewrite that information in some future code. He likens this to word processing, where opening a old version of the same software with the current version often ends up being incompatible. To meet this concept WC3 has come up with XML, a new hypertext that will work hand in hand with the older HTML. With XML comes metatags. Metatags are simply data describing data. What? Well, with XML, computers will better be able to search the Web and read these (meta)tags which describe exactly what the page is about and who authored it. This goes a long way to providing better security in regard to authenticating sources and narrowing down exactly what you're looking for. Berners-Lee poses a typical HTML seach question,"Is there a green car for sale for $15,000 in Queensland?" because of XML tags and their ability to describe and link more information, he can narrow down the search and say, "Does someone who owns such a car, owe me money?" XML will produce better searches for the everyday user, it will cut through the junk we don't want and get us the content we do.
The Web has the world waiting to see what will come next and the possibilities are endless. The key word however is "waiting". Most people spend too much time waiting instead of interacting. With technology moving at its current rate these things will all fall into place over time. Research into key areas like the Internet II, photonics and wireless communications are paving the way to a wider and wider web. It is visionaries such as Tim Berners-Lee that will have future generations applauding his contributions for his altruistic direction guiding the standardization of the Web. After all in 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type it changed the way a world would think. Tim Berners-Lee just linked all those words together.
Beau Calvez is currently studying multimedia at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. He hopes to one day enter into the field of authoring in interactive New Media and to own his own business. A native Calgarian, Beau has travelled extensively and hopes to continue to do so in work and pleasure.
FACER
E-Zine V2#1
Foundations, Projections and Issues