Tim Berners-Lee Vergil Bushnell

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Tim Berners-LeeVergil Bushnell

• Known as the Father of the Web

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Berners-Lee the Webs Origins

• Born into a computing family in England.
• While employed by CERN in Geneva, worked on a
  database project, Enquire.
• Enquire attempted to create and catalog
  associations between separate items of
  information
• from this side project, he conceptualized the
  hyperlink.

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Web Fundamental Concepts When you make a link,
you can link to anything.

• Universal Document Identifiers (UDI) now called
  URLs. Unique serial numbers for online data.
• HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) allows easy
  authoring of web documents, including links.
• HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol codified the
  transmission of web content between client/server
• First webclient and webserver (on NeXT)

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Core Beliefs Reflected in Web

• Open Standards
• Universality
• Net Neutrality

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Open Standards

• Berners-Lee used freely available, open standards
  to create and popularize the Web, such as TCP/IP.
  Anyone could plug into and use these protocols.
• Berners-Lee warns against the walled garden
  effect AOL in the 90s. Or, as he states about
  Apples iTunes
• You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world
  is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in
  a single store, rather than being on the open
  marketplace. For all the stores wonderful
  features, its evolution is limited to what one
  company thinks up.

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Universality/Interoperability

• Access to all, including the disabled.
• Web standards should be universal, accessible to
  anyone on any platform regardless of cost,
  Operating System or software.
• Berners-Lee and the W3C urge interoperability as
  opposed to the closed, secret and proprietary.

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Net Neutrality

• Essentially, ISPs and governments the
  maintainers of the Internet's highways (to use
  another 90's term) should impartially respect the
  flow of all online content.
• Examples Governments tracking or censoring
  dissenting opinions, like The Great Firewall of
  China, Comcast throttling the speeds of
  BitTorrent data.
• Mergers of ISPs and Content Providers (AOL/TW)

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The mission continues

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• Semantic Web
• WWW Foundation working on a Web Index to
  survey global web access and usage
• Knighted by the Queen
• His work is explained in Weaving the Web