GENEVA: The World Wide Web yesterday marked its 20th anniversary, and one of its founders admitted there are bits of the phenomenon he does not like.
The creation of the Web by British computer software genius Tim Berners-Lee and other scientists at the European particle physics laboratory (CERN) paved the way for the Internet explosion which has changed our daily lives.
Berners-Lee and CERN colleagues such as Robert Caillau, who originally set up the system to allow thousands of scientists around the world to stay in touch, took part in yesterday’s commemorations at the laboratory.
In March 1989, the young Berners-Lee handed his supervisor in Geneva a document entitled “Information Management: A Proposal.”
The supervisor described it as “vague, but exciting” and later gave it the go-ahead, according to CERN.
“It was really in the air, something that had to happen sooner or later,” said former CERN systems engineer Caillau, who teamed up with Berners-Lee.
They drew up the global hypertext language — which is behind the “http” on website addresses — and came up with the first Web browser in October 1990, which looks remarkably similar to the ones we use today. “Everything that people talk about today, blogs and so on, that’s what we were doing in 1990, there’s no difference. That’s how we started,” Caillau told Swiss radio RSR.
The WWW technology was first made available for wider use on the Internet from 1991 after CERN was unable to ensure its development, and the organization made a landmark decision two years later not to levy royalties.
Caillau still marvels at developments like Wikipedia that allow knowledge to be exchanged openly around the Web, but never imagined that search engines would take on the importance they have now.
“A search engine is very centralized ... while the Web is totally decentralized, I couldn’t have predicted the things that it does,” he said.
But the commercial development of the Web still irritates some of the founders.
“There are some things I don’t like at all, such as the fact that people have to live off advertising,” said Caillau, who preferred the idea of direct “micro payments” to information providers.
“And there’s the big problem of identity, of course, the trust between the person who is consulting and the person who provides the page, as well as the protection of children,” he added.
Berners-Lee, now a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States and a university professor in Southampton, Britain, still heads the World Wide Web Consortium that coordinates development of the Web.
