Home > Media > Books > Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti - Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor
Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti - Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor
alexwright's Full Review: Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti - Weaving the W...
If ever a man deserved a royalty check, it's Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who quite literally invented the World Wide Web.
As one of the millions of people whose lives have changed for the better as a result of Berners-Lee's invention, I for one was more than happy to take advantage of the opportunity to pad the man's checkbook.
Ever since Berners-Lee wrote and released the first public versions of his CERN Web server and browser programs in the early 90s, he has watched his brainchild evolve and mushroom into a world-changing technology. What's remarkable about Berners-Lee is that in the ensuing era of crazed wealth creation, he has consistently resisted opportunities to cash in, electing instead to play a statesmanlike role as chairman of the non-profit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the international body that governs (or at least attempts to govern) Web standards and ensure that the Web remains a level playing field with open standards, indomitable by any one company.
Berners-Lee begins his tale recounting his earliest experiments with hypertext information retrieval systems at CERN, the Swiss particle physics laboratory. He describes an early prototype application called Enquire which was, alas, lost forever as the result of a calamitous diskette mix-up in the early 80s (one can't help but wonder how things might have played out had the original program survived). Berners-Lee began work on what become today's World Wide Web in 1989, finally releasing his first Web server and browser programs to the public in 1993. And the rest, as they say, well, you know...
Most of the book centers on the seminal early days of the Web in the mid-1990s, when Berners-Lee made the all-important decision to release his code to the public and eventually allow commercialization by young companies like Netscape and Spyglass. He recounts his fateful early meetings with a young Marc Andreessen, and well-told anecdotes of his early struggles to forge the World Wide Web Consortium in the Byzantium of the software industry, wrestling consensus from recalcitrant giants like IBM, Microsoft and Sun.
Berners-Lee talks most passionately about his struggles to maintain standards ? with decidedly mixed success - in the face of growing competitive pressures among consortium members, and the onrush of new Web-centric technologies like Java and XML.
The book closes with a few chapters outlining his vision of a future Web - less dependent on the desktop PC, expanding through increasingly persistent, universal customer access, device independence, and of course continuing evolution in Web standards. Most interesting are his closing ruminations on the unfulfilled aspects of his vision: of a highly collaborative, participatory environment, less driven by the consumerist imperative of the commercial software industry - a Web that might offer users not just the palliative sop of "interactivity," but of more enriching "intercreativity" in the form of interactive and egalitarian environments for collaboration between individuals and organizations.
The book provides a solid accounting of Berners-Lee?s life in a straightforward chronological narrativee. If at times edging towards self-aggrandizement (as, of course, autobiographies tend to do), this book nonetheless affords a rare first-hand glimpse into the early formative days of the Web, as well as a few provocative ideas about what might come next.
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