Poor Tim. Look what they’ve done to his Web.
What are you talking about? The web was always about capitalism and centralization!
You would never want to run your own email server, or run your own blog. It’s good that the big corps systematically block you out so you as an individual have to use their services. Who wants privacy really? Sounds like criminal stuff, we just need to peek at your data to serve you better ads. Ignore law enforcement paying us for your data, nothing bad will come of that.
Tim’s intention with the web was information sharing. He wanted a way for academics to share their work with other academics. He identified a problem at his time at CERN, and proposed a solution.
Then corporations were quick on capitalizing on this idea.
Yes sorry I was being sarcastic.
I think it’s a tragedy we’ve lost individual websites and services, and the modern web is dying.
I think it’s a tragedy we’ve lost individual websites and services
They felt so alive. Back then like a sun and now like a candle.
Sometimes in the Web Archive or some forgotten but still running amateur hosting, or in Neocities you can see those old pages, they feel like visiting someone’s home, frozen in time since 2003.
You would never want to run your own email server, or run your own blog.
There were many more email services than now, and not too expensive hosting for personal webpages was common.
Not erasing that for history, my irony detector is slow
I would feel more sympathetic to him if not for that time he betrayed us on DRM.
Have you ever encountered error code 402? Payment Required
That’s been part of HTTP since at least 1992. His w3c wanted to make micropayments part of the web. The reason it did not take off is that no one had a use for it. The web was too cheap to meter.
This would be perfect for the current problem of monetizing journalism. I am happy to pay a small fee to read an article. I am not ok subscribing to your entire website that requires an account when I get blasted with unsolicited emails and my data is sold to a 3rd party to pad your profits.
You don’t really sound like someone who’d be happy to have a payment system hard-coded into their browser. I don’t think it would help, either. Just as with ads you’d be monetizing clickbait and not journalism.
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There were a bunch of systems, back during the dotcom bubble. You can see a list in the specs: https://www.w3.org/ECommerce/Micropayments/Overview.html#Reading
Ironic that he talks about Leadership, hindered by a lack of diversity, has steered away from a tool for public good and one that is instead subject to capitalist forces resulting in monopolisation in Medium, a company that also tries to monopolize and capitalize the blog’s information
Yea I agree, it’s a bit strange to me that the inventor of the web doesn’t seem to have a personal blog site for his own writing.
Platforms actually have one significant advantage over personal websites, blogs, disconnected forums: You only have to go to one website (open one app) in order to read everything you find interesting. You don’t have to remember to go to 5 different forums and read 15 different blogs.
Of course the disadvantage is that they are a lot easier to censor because they’re a single point of failure.
ActivityPub should in theory be the best of both worlds, but I am not too optimistic; people, organizations, governments wanting to censor people they don’t like will always find a way. :(
When you invent the www, you get to use w3.org as your blog… e.g.
https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Charlie.html
more:
Doesn’t seem like he’s used it since 2020 though
So? He stays pretty busy with Solid / Inrupt and his other advocacy (e.g., the OP article…)
Perhaps he sees the personal blog format as a bit egotistical or otherwise not fit for purpose. Or perhaps he just isn’t a naturally talented writer. Its not as if he’s shy about sharing his thoughts outside that.
Also worth noting that he and Bruce Schneier, who is a much more prolific writer, share many of the same views and partner together at Inrupt.
Interesting read, although I do not understand everything. It’s nice to hear a fediverse shout-out.
@[email protected] my biggest worry is that his Solid POD has been coming from about 2016 in design and was funded 2021 or so, and I remember it being announced in 2022 or so. In today’s world, that is pretty slow-going. It seemed to always be imminent. I even registered a POD back in 2022… and then nothing still after two years. So many other decentralised protocols have been adopted since then.
Admittedly we do have an urgent need for one’s own POD identity no matter where you are on social networks, but I still don’t see how we’re going to get ActivityPub, Nostr, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc to all adopt it.
Yeah. It’s an interesting concept, but I can’t see why anyone would want to use it.
@[email protected] it’s about retaining a single identity for yourself, and one which you control and link to where you are using it vs a unique profile at every different social network.
As far as I understand, you’d store eg tracking data in the POD. That would allow apps/services to give you better recommendations or personalized ads. The only party with any interest in writing to the POD is the end-user, but their interest is tiny. Better recommendations, so what? Advertisers prefer to keep their data private to have an edge over the competition.
Tim Berners-Lee is mad. The internet’s father is mad.
Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine.
That’s one proud ass dude. I wish I invented the web, so I could utter those words. Legend.
Why does this guy think he invented the web? I don’t know enough to say he didn’t, but why does he think so?
Wasn’t it a multi-person/org effort? Isn’t that why everyone laughed at Al Gore when he implied the same? After going on about the need to decentralize, this guy wants to take the credit himself?
I mean… He made www, HTML, URLs and HTTP. Literally everything you used to write your comment he was involved in. I’m sure he didn’t do it entirely alone, we always build on what came before us. But it’s not inaccurate to call him the inventor of the Web.
Also remember the Web is not the same as the Internet.
What’s the difference between the two?
The “web” part runs atop the “Internet” part, where web is at the application layer (those lines can blur on that), and internet is the lower levels of the OCI Model. See image.
Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away
The World Wide Web is more or less the Internet as most users see it - HTML documents located via URLs shared over the HTTP protocol. But that’s just one specific protocol used for sharing a specific kind of content (hypertext). It turns out you can do a whole lot with that, hence the ubiquity of the Web.
But the Internet as a whole is broader than that. There are other protocols, other content to share, other ways to locate data. For a down-to-earth familiar example, just consider any online multiplayer game. You’re using the Internet to communicate to the game’s servers to play the game, but that Internet traffic is certainly not part of the Web.
When you’re playing an MMORPG you’re not using the web, but you’re using the Internet. The Internet is like the postal service relaying stuff, but the stuff can be of different kinds.
The Web is websites (HTML pages served over HTTP, which link to each other via hyperlinks). The Internet is websites plus email, VoIP, IRC, Usenet, bittorrent, game servers, FTP, SSH, and everything else that isn’t a website.
Web is just the website part. Like web pages you see in the web browser. Tim Berners Lee invented this part.
Internet encompasses more things. For example, sending texts in some mobile app. You’re not necessarily seeing a web page. You’re just sending data from your device to some other device in the world.
Or to be more technical: web is HTTP. Internet is that and everything else (like FTP, SMTP, SSH, etc).
Or more simply: The internet is just the network. The web is one of the handful of “apps” that run directly using that network. It just also happens to be able to run apps of its own these days and is a pretty “killer” one at that :)
(Edit: please disregard the wrong link that summoned the bot below. It’s been fixed. And I do not have a Balatro problem…)
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Tim’s name is the only one on the original html rfc. He is also a contributor on the httpd rfcs.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1866
So as far as content creation is concerned, yes he invented it. Html markup made it very easy for non-technical people to easily create their own web pages. That we no longer do that as individuals is the main point he is making. The original intent of the tool has been taken over by marketing and capitalism.
Before his work we communicated and shared via ftp, telnet, usenet, gopher, smtp, and irc.
He developed HTML, HTTP, URL, the first browser and the first Webserver…
Al Gore claimed to invent the internet.
Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web. He did this through the creation of technologies foundational to web browsers, including the URL, HTTP, and HTML. That he invented them isn’t controversial.
Al Gore claimed to invent the internet.
Al Gore claimed to be involved in approving the funding which resulted in the creation of the Internet.
When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part): “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.”
-Snopes
His choice of words was poor and makes it sound like alone “took the initiative in creating the internet.” Whatever he really meant, his wording makes it sound like he’s claiming a bit more credit for his role than it merits.
It’s also worth reading an open letter from Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf on the issue. While no one person invented the Internet, those two would be towards the top of the list of people who were involved in inventing it.
https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
tl;dr: Al Gore was among the first policy makers to really understand its importance, and pushed for legislation that got it into people’s homes. Technical people tend to scoff at politicians a lot, but good policy making is important. The Internet would not have taken off the same way without Al Gore.
“Took initiative in creating the internet” sounds a lot to me like making sure it happened (which is exactly the role a government official should have; funding and policy). It’s very different than claiming he invented it.
Well, if you trust Wikipedia as a source, the second paragraph of the article on the World Wide Web starts out:
“The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee…”
You are confusing the Internet and the web. You should look it up.
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He made the web as we know it. There were a few other projects that were reaching similar goals and were considered part of the “world wide web” at the time but have been largely forgotten. Gopher was the most popular for a time, and there were a few others that were barely more than research projects. Going by peak deployment numbers, Gemini might now be the second most popular web technology ever (maybe; I haven’t seen a credible breakdown or anything, just guessing).
In any case, Tim Berners-Lee made HTTP and HTML, and that combination is the basis for the modern web. So much so that we tend to talk about it as the web.
