Fresh Air Interview: Tim Berners-Lee: The Creator of the World Wide Web.

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. He created the web in 1989, as a way to organize his own projects. The Web has grown rapidly since then. In 1992 there were 100 sites on it, as of last May there were 22,000. Berners-Lee is dedicated to keeping the Web open as a public good. He now works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he heads the World Wide Web Consortium, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing standards, protocols and new software for the Web.

Freeing the Web from the Browser

the ability to create new links is a privilege granted only to content producers. The vast majority of those interested in a piece of work are merely readers, unable to contribute, only to consume.

.. The degree to which this constrains the Web is hard to overstate. Can we really expect authors to identify all salient connections from a piece of work to the wider Web?

.. One could imagine a system in which multiple sets of links could be associated with a single resource

.. connecting information together becomes a powerful tool available to all rather than a privilege granted only to content producers

.. As it turns out, these ideas aren’t new. In fact, Vannevar Bush pondered the benefits of these kinds of capabilities way back in 1945 in his visionary essay As We May Think.

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.Vannevar Bush (As We May Think, 1945)

.. These ideas were also central to a movement within the hypermedia research community from the late ’80s to early ’00s known as open hypermedia.

.. Unlike the WWW, open hypermedia systems make a hard separation between hypermedia structure — such as links and transclusions

.. Links are stored completely separately from the content upon which they are to be displayed, and all hypermedia functionality — including creation of and interaction with links — is exposed via an open protocol implemented by an independent program called the ‘link server’.

..  open hypermedia systems require an astounding amount of design and engineering work, and in return offer benefits of unclear value. 

.. it’s not at all clear if the effort required to move to a potentially better solution is worth the cost.

.. what is really lacking — in my view — is research considering the human factors at play.

..  In the words of Doug Engelbart: “Any possibility for improving the effective utilization of the intellectual power of society’s problem solvers warrants the most serious consideration … man’s problem-solving capability represents possibly the most important resource possessed by a society”.