I think it’s a little hard to blame Tim here, DRM was happening with or without it being part of HTML. Either it could be in proprietary plugins or it could be part of the spec, but as long as movie studios were requiring DRM, DRM was going to happen. If anyone railroaded it through, it would be Google, who owns Widevine, and via Chrome, basically can determine web standards with or without the W3C’s support, from a practical sense.
So the W3C has to accept DRM to prevent it being in a proprietary plugin, and Firefox had to also accept the DRM to avoid being “the browser that can’t play Netflix”, and everyone effectively has to go along with it to ensure they still have a seat at the table on the issue, but it all, at the end, comes back to the MPAA, which isn’t going to let you have a license to stream their content unless it is locked with DRM, regardless of how futile DRM actually is.
.. I think the following quote from Braveheart is awesome. The whole movie seems designed to turn the audience into William Wallace worshipers, except for this line, which causes an attentive viewer to stop and think:
“Admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage, so does a dog. But it is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a man noble.”
Mary Lee Berners-Lee obituary
Computer scientist who became one of the world’s first freelance programmers in the 1950s
The computer scientist Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who has died aged 93, was on the programming team for the computer that in 1951 became the first in the world to be sold commercially: the Ferranti Mark I. She led a successful campaign at Ferranti for equal pay for male and female programmers, almost two decades before the Equal Pay Act came into force. As a young mother in the mid-1950s she set up on her own as a home-based software consultant, making her one of the world’s first freelance programmers.
Modest about her own pioneering achievements, she is on record (in an interview with computer historian Janet Abbate) as saying that her biggest contribution was to be “the grandmother of the web”. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), the eldest of her four children, proposed a system to access and exchange documents across the internet, and soon afterwards built the first web server, website and browser.
Tim Berners-Lee’s Announcement of the WWW, 25 years ago
In article <1991Aug…@ardor.enet.dec.com> kan…@ardor.enet.dec.com (Nari Kannan) writes:
>
> Is anyone reading this newsgroup aware of research or development efforts
in
> the
> following areas:
>> 1. Hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources
of
> information?The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any
information anywhere. The address format includes an access method
(=namespace), and for most name spaces a hostname and some sort of path.We have a prototype hypertext editor for the NeXT, and a browser for line mode
terminals which runs on almost anything. These can access files either locally,
NFS mounted, or via anonymous FTP. They can also go out using a simple protocol
(HTTP) to a server which interprets some other data and returns equivalent
hypertext files. For example, we have a server running on our mainframe
http://cernvm.cern.ch/ in WWW syntax) which makes all the CERN computer
center documentation available. The HTTP protocol allows for a keyword search
on an index, which generates a list of matching documents as annother virtual
hypertext document.If you’re interested in using the code, mail me. It’s very prototype, but
available by anonymous FTP from info.cern.ch. It’s copyright CERN but free
distribution and use is not normally a problem.The NeXTstep editor can also browse news. If you are using it to read this,
then click on this: <http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html> to find
out more about the project. We haven’t put the news access into the line mode
browser yet.We also have code for a hypertext server. You can use this to make files
available (like anonymous FTP but faster because it only uses one connection).
You can also hack it to take a hypertext address and generate a virtual
hypertext document from any other data you have – database, live data etc. It’s
just a question of generating plain text or SGML (ugh! but standard) mark-up on
the fly. The browsers then parse it on the fly.The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data,
news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other
areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome! I’ll
post a short summary as a separate article.
Tim Berners-Leeti…@info.cern. ch
World Wide Web projectTel: +41(22)767 3755
CERNFax: +41(22)767 7155
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland (usual disclaimer)