Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web
by Tim Berners-lee, Mark Fischetti, Mark Fischetti (With), Michael L. Dertouzos (Foreword by), Michael Dertouzos
Publisher: HarperCollins PublishersPages: 256
Paperback
ISBN: 9780062515872
Overview of Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web
Named one of the greatest minds of the 20th century by Time, Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for one of that century's most important advancements: the world wide web. Now, this low-profile genius-who never personally profitted from his invention -offers a compelling protrait of his invention. He reveals the Web's origins and the creation of the now ubiquitous http and www acronyms and shares his views on such critical issues as censorship, privacy, the increasing power of softeware companies , and the need to find the ideal balance between commercial and social forces. He offers insights into the true nature of the Web, showing readers how to use it to its fullest advantage. And he presents his own plan for the Web's future, calling for the active support and participation of programmers, computer manufacturers, and social organizations to manage and maintain this valuable resource so that it can remain a powerful force for social change and an outlet for individual creativity.
Synopsis of Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web
As pioneer of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee ranks right alongside Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as one of the most influential figures of the digital era. In this fascinating personal history, Berners-Lee discusses his boyhood in England building cardboard-box computers, his salad days in the 1980s when he laid the groundwork for and finally unleashed the Web, and his present position as director of the MIT-based World Wide Web Consortium. He also articulates his personal vision of the Web as a powerful force for social change and creativity, provides insight into the current state of the Web, and presents his plan for the future of the medium. "Every issue arising around and about the Web...is being responded to and molded by the largely hidden hands of Berners-Lee.''—Scientific American.
Industry Standard
The inventor of the World Wide Web has finally penned his story. He had to. He's a bit tired of having to explain to people (especially reporters) where his millions are -- or aren't, as is the case.
Tim Berners-Lee, 44, the British physicist who directs the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has had loftier goals than money-making in the 10 years since he conceived of one of the technological world's greatest innovations. Not that there's anything wrong with making money, he insists. But Berners-Lee has dedicated his work to the health and continued growth of the Web, which now means heading the world's coordinating body for Web development instead of founding the latest Internet startup.
In his new book, Weaving the Web, written with Mark Fischetti, Berners-Lee details the confluence of ideas, technological developments and influences that enabled him to conceive of the Web. He also talks about the many stumbling blocks he encountered. And then he goes on to persuade his readers that they, too, should be more concerned and more involved with directing the course of this new medium.
Written in an easy-to-read, conversational style, the book may finally bring about what Berners-Lee's modesty has helped prevent in the past. He may finally achieve in the public eye, instead of only in the annals of technology history, his rightful place as creator of the Web. He's not only not as rich as Bill Gates or Marc Andreessen -- he hasn't been as well recognized, either.
While acclaim has been slow in coming for the publicity-shy Berners-Lee, it is finally arriving. Last year, he won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant to continue his work on standards development with the W3C. In March, Time listed him as one of the 100 greatest minds of the 20th century.
Amazing as it may seem now, Berners- Lee actually had a tough time convincing people that he was on to something. In 1989, he was working at the CERN particle-physics laboratory in Geneva when he proposed a "global hypertext project."
"Imagine making a large three-dimensional model, with people represented by little spheres, and strings between people who have something in common at work," he wrote in his proposal. "Perhaps a linked information system will allow us to see the real structure of the organization in which we work."
His story of the Web's development actually starts much earlier. Unlike Newton getting beaned by an apple, the concept of the Web never came down to one "Eureka!" moment, he insists. The son of mathematicians, Berners-Lee was intrigued early on by the idea that a computer could be programmed to complete connections similar to the way the brain does. When he first took a software-consulting job with CERN in 1980, he wrote a program called Enquire to help him remember connections between the various people, computers and projects at the esteemed laboratory. The program gave him larger ideas. "Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked," he recalls thinking.
After getting the go-ahead at CERN for his global project, Berners-Lee started writing the underpinnings of the Web. He eventually wrote the hypertext markup language, or HTML; the hypertext transfer protocol, or "http://" that today begins the many million Web addresses; and the uniform resource locators, or URLs, that have become akin to the telephone numbers of cyberspace.
Curiously, technology companies were slow to grasp what was in the offing. They couldn't understand how a system that was decentralized and had no central repository of data would thrive. Berners-Lee recalls being shot down at his first Internet Engineering Task Force meeting for his suggestion about creating a "universal document identifier."
"How could I be so presumptuous as to define my creation as 'universal'?" he recalls sensing. But the Web's following did build in a grassroots sort of way. In July and August 1991, the Web server at CERN was getting from 10 to 100 hits per day, which would soon begin to double every few months until technicians were recording 10,000 hits per day in 1993.
Some of the most interesting insights into the coming commercialization of the Web are recounted by Berners-Lee, who in 1993 visited the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where student Marc Andreessen and staff member Eric Bina were creating the Mosaic Web browser.
"It was becoming clear to me in the days before I went to Chicago that the people at NCSA were attempting to portray themselves as the center of Web development, and to basically rename the Web as Mosaic," he recounts. "At NCSA, something wasn't 'on the Web,' it was 'on Mosaic.'"
But Berners-Lee gives credit where credit is due. He points out that Andreessen, who would later hook up with entrepreneur Jim Clark to found Netscape Communications (and hire away the NCSA team), did work that eventually led to the more widespread popularity of the Web.
Berners-Lee admits he has toyed with the idea of starting a company. He opted instead to start the W3C. "My motivation was to make sure that the Web became what I originally intended it to be -- a universal medium for sharing information," he writes. "Starting a company would not have done much to further this goal, and it would have risked the prompting of competition, which would have turned the Web into a bunch of proprietary products."
By following the consortium route, which led him to relocate from CERN to MIT in Cambridge, Mass., Berners-Lee has been able to maintain a neutral viewpoint. Among the initiatives the W3C has developed with its members, which include the top Internet and computer companies, are the Platform for Internet Content Selection rating system, the Platform for Privacy Protection and Extensible Markup Language.
Berners-Lee says he wrote the book not only to tell the story of the Web but also to warn that his goal for the Web -- to link credible information worldwide -- could be destroyed. He fears the growing consolidation of Internet service providers and the potential for one company to exert control over the medium and the content of the Web. In addition, he says, it's important for Internet companies to distinguish between independent advice and that which comes from paid partners. "The medium can be perverted, giving you what seems to be the world, but in fact is a tilted and twisted version," he writes.
This comes from a man who chose to maintain his integrity in the high-tech world rather than cash in. Had he taken the path to riches, the Web as we know it may never have been born.
—Elizabeth Wasserman
Reviews of Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web
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From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewOctober 1999
The First Man on the Web
The story of the creation of the World Wide Web is the newest update on the classic story of technological invention. Like the telegraph, the telephone, and countless other giant leaps forward that transformed our culture, the Web was the product of a lone genius (and his assistants) laboring away in relative obscurity on a project for which none but he saw the potential.
Like all the classic tales of brilliant invention, this simplified version of the story barely does justice to the years of work and breadth of vision that went into making the Web â and, by extension, the whole Internet â the fastest-growing communications system in all of human history. Thankfully, to fill in the holes left by the shorthand version, the inventor himself, Tim Berners-Lee, has put the story of his work into Weaving the Web.
To casual users and online neophytes, it might seem like the Web appeared overnight, that one day back in 1995, there was no Web and the next day, everyone was talking about it. And compared with earlier technological shifts such as radio, television, and personal computers, the speed of the Web's growth was lightning fast. But it wasn't overnight. Fifteen years before every ad began including a dot com address and every hot stock was an Internet IPO, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer working at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, wrote the first computer program that vaguely resembled today's Web.TheWeb itself was still ten years away. The first web site and server went up in 1990. The first people who could see it got browsers in 1991, all of them working at the same physics lab and all of them using powerful but relatively uncommon NeXT computers. They spread the news to other physics labs around the world. By the middle of 1991, there were no more than 100 hits per day on any web page. A year later there were still only a handful of web servers and a few dozen users. Unix machines could now browse the Web, but there was still no software to let people running Macintosh, Windows, or DOS machines see the Web.
In telling this story, Weaving the Web serves several purposes. First, it sets the record straight. Mark Andreessen, who helped write the first popular Windows browser, Mosaic, and later founded Netscape, has become such a pop-culture figure that he now appears in beer commercials. But there could have been no Netscape without Berners-Lee. There would be no Internet billionaires without Berners-Lee and his team.
Second, and not inconsequential, Weaving the Web is a compendium of geek trivia. Did you know the first web site was http://info.cern.ch? That if not for a mix of absentminded and, occasionally, forward-thinking decisions on the part of CERN, there would be no Web? That the busiest site in the world was getting just 10,000 hits per day in 1993?
The third and perhaps most important purpose of Weaving the Web is to give Berners-Lee a forum to restate firmly his vision of the Web as an information-exchange medium rooted in open standards with the broadest participation possible. The idea of a few large media companies pushing information at millions of passive Web surfers is not his ideal. The notion that any company should control any aspect of the fundamental Web technologies is his worst nightmare.
It is refreshing to be reminded that the Web was not invented to be a virtual mall and that in Berners-Lee's original vision, publishing onto the Web was as simple as reading from it. Berners-Lee still works as a guardian of his invention as the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a research and industry group that designs and issues recommended standards for new Web technologies. And it is clear from Weaving the Web that the future of this powerful medium has a smart and influential advocate in its inventor.
âGreg Sewell
Industry Standard
DreamweaverThe inventor of the World Wide Web has finally penned his story. He had to. He's a bit tired of having to explain to people (especially reporters) where his millions are -- or aren't, as is the case.
Tim Berners-Lee, 44, the British physicist who directs the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has had loftier goals than money-making in the 10 years since he conceived of one of the technological world's greatest innovations. Not that there's anything wrong with making money, he insists. But Berners-Lee has dedicated his work to the health and continued growth of the Web, which now means heading the world's coordinating body for Web development instead of founding the latest Internet startup.
In his new book, Weaving the Web, written with Mark Fischetti, Berners-Lee details the confluence of ideas, technological developments and influences that enabled him to conceive of the Web. He also talks about the many stumbling blocks he encountered. And then he goes on to persuade his readers that they, too, should be more concerned and more involved with directing the course of this new medium.
Written in an easy-to-read, conversational style, the book may finally bring about what Berners-Lee's modesty has helped prevent in the past. He may finally achieve in the public eye, instead of only in the annals of technology history, his rightful place as creator of the Web. He's not only not as rich as Bill Gates or Marc Andreessen -- he hasn't been as well recognized, either.
While acclaim has been slow in coming for the publicity-shy Berners-Lee, it is finally arriving. Last year, he won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant to continue his work on standards development with the W3C. In March, Time listed him as one of the 100 greatest minds of the 20th century.
Amazing as it may seem now, Berners- Lee actually had a tough time convincing people that he was on to something. In 1989, he was working at the CERN particle-physics laboratory in Geneva when he proposed a "global hypertext project."
"Imagine making a large three-dimensional model, with people represented by little spheres, and strings between people who have something in common at work," he wrote in his proposal. "Perhaps a linked information system will allow us to see the real structure of the organization in which we work."
His story of the Web's development actually starts much earlier. Unlike Newton getting beaned by an apple, the concept of the Web never came down to one "Eureka!" moment, he insists. The son of mathematicians, Berners-Lee was intrigued early on by the idea that a computer could be programmed to complete connections similar to the way the brain does. When he first took a software-consulting job with CERN in 1980, he wrote a program called Enquire to help him remember connections between the various people, computers and projects at the esteemed laboratory. The program gave him larger ideas. "Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked," he recalls thinking.
After getting the go-ahead at CERN for his global project, Berners-Lee started writing the underpinnings of the Web. He eventually wrote the hypertext markup language, or HTML; the hypertext transfer protocol, or "http://" that today begins the many million Web addresses; and the uniform resource locators, or URLs, that have become akin to the telephone numbers of cyberspace.
Curiously, technology companies were slow to grasp what was in the offing. They couldn't understand how a system that was decentralized and had no central repository of data would thrive. Berners-Lee recalls being shot down at his first Internet Engineering Task Force meeting for his suggestion about creating a "universal document identifier."
"How could I be so presumptuous as to define my creation as 'universal'?" he recalls sensing. But the Web's following did build in a grassroots sort of way. In July and August 1991, the Web server at CERN was getting from 10 to 100 hits per day, which would soon begin to double every few months until technicians were recording 10,000 hits per day in 1993.
Some of the most interesting insights into the coming commercialization of the Web are recounted by Berners-Lee, who in 1993 visited the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where student Marc Andreessen and staff member Eric Bina were creating the Mosaic Web browser.
"It was becoming clear to me in the days before I went to Chicago that the people at NCSA were attempting to portray themselves as the center of Web development, and to basically rename the Web as Mosaic," he recounts. "At NCSA, something wasn't 'on the Web,' it was 'on Mosaic.'"
But Berners-Lee gives credit where credit is due. He points out that Andreessen, who would later hook up with entrepreneur Jim Clark to found Netscape Communications (and hire away the NCSA team), did work that eventually led to the more widespread popularity of the Web.
Berners-Lee admits he has toyed with the idea of starting a company. He opted instead to start the W3C. "My motivation was to make sure that the Web became what I originally intended it to be -- a universal medium for sharing information," he writes. "Starting a company would not have done much to further this goal, and it would have risked the prompting of competition, which would have turned the Web into a bunch of proprietary products."
By following the consortium route, which led him to relocate from CERN to MIT in Cambridge, Mass., Berners-Lee has been able to maintain a neutral viewpoint. Among the initiatives the W3C has developed with its members, which include the top Internet and computer companies, are the Platform for Internet Content Selection rating system, the Platform for Privacy Protection and Extensible Markup Language.
Berners-Lee says he wrote the book not only to tell the story of the Web but also to warn that his goal for the Web -- to link credible information worldwide -- could be destroyed. He fears the growing consolidation of Internet service providers and the potential for one company to exert control over the medium and the content of the Web. In addition, he says, it's important for Internet companies to distinguish between independent advice and that which comes from paid partners. "The medium can be perverted, giving you what seems to be the world, but in fact is a tilted and twisted version," he writes.
This comes from a man who chose to maintain his integrity in the high-tech world rather than cash in. Had he taken the path to riches, the Web as we know it may never have been born.
âElizabeth Wasserman
Katie Hafner
Well worth reading. It is a book written by the ultimate good guy...He goes out of his way to make it clear that he was not the only one to have done all the work.â NY Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
This lucid but impersonal memoir conveys some vital history and intriguing philosophy concerning the Internet, written by the man who invented such ubiquitous terms as URL, HTML and World Wide Web. British-born physicist Berners-Lee is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which is based at MIT and sets software standards for the Web. In the late 1980s, he wrote the first programs that set up the Web, thus revolutionizing the Internet by allowing users to hyperlink among the world's computers. It was a quantum conceptual leap, and not everyone instantly understood it (some researchers had to be convinced that posting information was better than writing custom programs to transfer it). The release of graphical browsers such as Netscape Navigator made the Web much easier for home users to navigate and led to the commercialization of the Net. Although Berners-Lee calmly eschewed opportunities to get rich, he doesn't subscribe to the notion, common among pre-Web denizens of the Internet, that commercialization is a pox upon cyberspace. After short takes on current issues like privacy and pornography, Berners-Lee moves into prediction and prescription: the Web needs more intuitive interfaces and integration of tools, "annotation servers" that allow comments to be posted on documents and "social machines" that enable national plebiscites. And while he's no digital utopian, he thinks an Internet that balances decentralization and centralization can contribute to a more harmonious society. Berners-Lee's tone is more lofty than quotidian. He'd rather muse about the benefits of decentralization that his revolutionary technology makes possible than respond to Internet skeptics and critics. But he was very, very right a decade ago, and he's well worth reading now. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
The inventor of the World Wide Web tells how he did it, and what it means. Berners-Lee traces the Web to a "play" program he invented in 1980, while a consultant at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland. "Enquire," named after a Victorian advice book, stored information about the job in a nonhierarchical manner. The program impressed those who saw it, but nobody used it, and the disk containing it was eventually lost. But Berners-Lee was still interested in using computers to connect ideas. Returning to CERN a few years later, he began re-creating Enquire. One problem was allowing workers to use their preferred software without imposing a complex set of new rules governing access to the Web. Hypertext, which allowed any document to be linked to any other on the system, was the key to solving this problem. Also, by then, the Internet was beginning to come into existence in the US. Its standardized protocols seemed an ideal way to bridge between operating systems. By 1989, he was ready to create the Web. Progress was swift; within a year of its introduction, the number of users was doubling every three to four months. Berners-Lee acted as pitchman, convincing different groups to adopt standards that would increase the accessibility and utility of the Web. At last, CERN released the basic Web code and protocols into the public domain, without licensing feesâa step that insured that no hardware or software company would stand in the way of their propagation. Intent on keeping the Web universally accessible, Berners-Lee became head of the MIT-based World Wide Web Consortium, the arbiter of Web standards. In the final chapters of his book, he describes his visions for the Web: as amedium for collaboration, person-to-person and person-to-computer, ultimately restructuring society. Anyone who uses his invention can see how far that process has already come. A compelling combination of techno-history and visionary philosophy.Receive unbeatable book deals in your favorite fiction or non-fiction genres. Our daily emails are packed with new and bestselling authors you will love!
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