Commentary

WWW Inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee Teaches Us Evolution

I'm in awe. World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee shares his thoughts during a presentation at SXSW. Today's online marketers owe their livelihood and many entrepreneurs their business to this man. He said those designing WWW did so ignoring questions like how people would use it to send email or retrieve files. He's a little technical stepping through http, JavaScript and HTML, but worth the time to hear him speak. "The reason why the Internet sucks today is because we haven't fixed it yet," he said "We messed up."

2 comments about "WWW Inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee Teaches Us Evolution".
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  1. Tim Berners-lee from W3C, March 10, 2013 at 5:24 p.m.

    What a TERRIBLE MISQUOTE!

    Glad you enjoyed the talk, but maybe you remember me saying that Vint Cerf, Bob Khan and others had done a great job in making the Internet as an open platform, and how I followed their example by trying to make the web as open a platform as possible, as a platform for other's creativity.

    I also mentioned that those who build new system using large Javascript libraries on top of the Open Web Platform shoul di turn think about making theirs an open extensible platform too.

    I encouraged, maybe you forget, children to learn to code. And the words you must have misheard mist have been when I urged the new generation of web users to imagine something they would like to see different -- if you see something out they on the web which you think could be better, then you can go and indeed build something better.

    Maybe you could do me a favor and edit my comment out of your original post, as it has a bunch of people quite reasonably upset, and it really misses the very positive message of the talk.

    Tim Berners-Lee

  2. Laurie Sullivan from lauriesullivan, April 11, 2013 at 9:54 p.m.

    By the way, spread it around, tell all the kids that you know as they're coming up through middle school and high school, don't teach them in IT about how to use Microsoft Word. Teach them in computer science that a computer can do anything you can think of. And the reason it sucks so badly right now is because you haven't fixed it yet, because we messed up. We did quite well. We had a go, but . . . , according to Tim Berners-Lee at SXSW, talking about the Web as an open platform. . . .

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About the Author

Laurie Sullivan is a writer and editor for MediaPost. You can reach Laurie at lauriesullivan@gmail.com.

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