Weaving the Web - Hardcover

Tim Berners-Lee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0752820907 ISBN 13: 9780752820903

Publisher: Orion Business, 1999

Synopsis

English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee quietly laid the foundations for the World Wide Web (and consequently Hypertext) in 1980, created a prototype in 1990 and unleashed it to the public in 1991. Now overseeing his creation's growth, he tells the story of its growth and future development.

About this title

Review

If you can read this review (and voice your opinion about his book on Amazon.com), you have Tim Berners-Lee to thank. When you've read his no-nonsense account of how he invented the World Wide Web, you'll want to thank him again, for the sheer coolness of his ideas. One day in 1980, Berners-Lee, an Oxford-trained computer consultant, got a random thought: "Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked?" So he created a system to give every "page" on a computer a standard address (now called a URL, or Universal Resource Locator), accessible via the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), formatted with the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and visible with the first browser, which did the trick of linking us all up.

He may be the most self-effacing genius of the computer age, and his egalitarian mind is evident in the names he rejected for his invention: "I thought of Mine of Information, or MOI, but moi in French means 'me,' and that was too egocentric.... The Information Mine (TIM) was even more egocentric!" Also, a mine is a passive repository; the Web is something that grows inexorably from everyone's contributions. Berners-Lee fully credits the colorful characters who helped him get the bobsled of progress going--one colleague times his haircuts to match the solstices--but he's stubbornly independent-minded. His quest is to make the Web "a place where the whim of a human being and the reasoning of a machine coexist in an ideal, powerful mixture."

Hard-core tech types may wish Berners-Lee had gone into deeper detail about the road ahead: the "boon and threat" of XML, free vs. commercial software, VRML 3-D imaging, and such. But he wants everyone in on the debate, so he wrote a brisk book that virtually anyone can understand. --Tim Appelo

About the Author

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, is currently the director of theWorld Wide Web Consortium, the coordinating body for Web development, and heoccupies the 3Com Founders chair at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.Recipient of numerous awards, he received the distinguished MacArthurFellowship in 1998. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Edition details

• Publisher: Orion Business
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0752820907
• ISBN 13: 9780752820903
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288