

Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live The Web - ilamont
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

======
Ixiaus
The openness of the web, just as the openness of the Americas (when first
discovered), will inevitably turn into a demarcation of borders and "property"
dispute. The first settlers here had free reign, the land was truly "open"
just as the Internet was truly "open".

When it is so open that eventually the masses adopt it - it goes from being an
open entity to a closed entity because diversity of opinion is so wide amongst
the masses that it [the public as an entity] seeks to control it and manage it
(movement from expansion/openness to contraction/closedness). An interesting
example of social entropy.

Where will open, free, and innovative grounds be then? On the leading edge.
<http://gnunet.org>, FreeNet, VPNs, and even privately wired LANs are the best
examples I can think of right now but who know what the future will bring?
Maybe the next wave of open and neutral communications will be in the growth
of the DSN (Deep Space Network) as humans slowly take to the stars? I see true
open horizons less and less on the web now and a resurgence of the explorer
taking to places untouched by the majority; I see that most in privatized
space, space tourism, and hopefully space colonization.

You will rarely ever find true "open" or "neutral" proclivities amongst the
many - you can only find it amongst _Individuals_ of whom the hacker community
is largely made up of. Politicians serve the masses and not the Individual,
you will never get the politicians to embody leading edge ideas because they
will never be elected since mass-consciousness by definition _cannot_ be
leading edge.

I'm repeating myself now. I just wanted to say: I do wish the web could stay
as open as it has been or was even ten years ago but as more people adopt it
and use it the less open it becomes; look for the ability to share knowledge
and information anonymously through software like GNUnet and FreeNet or VPN or
LAN networks. Look for the next wave of revolutionary ideas, platforms, and
social change to occur through leading edge spaces. The Internet is no longer
leading edge to those that have been riding this wave - look for the next one!
(for me, the next one is (again) privatized space)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Land is ultimately a bounded resource, and staking out property is a zero-sum
game. the web is, for all intents and purposes, unbounded.

~~~
eugenejen
I agree what you said. But the total time spent on Internet of all human being
will be bounded, not infinite. You can only have 7 x 18 billion person-hours a
day to use different services. What you have to compete is the time that users
uses your service.

Of course I maybe wrong in above statement. The statement doesn't include all
automated computing processes. Then the limit may be much larger to be
considered as unlimited.

~~~
PostOnce
so... Governments will restrict the web to steal market share from various web
apps? I think you may have misinterpreted what they're talking about. :P

------
user24
pretty sad to see this article split onto six pages and surrounded by adverts.

In fact the more at look at the site, the more principles it violates - on
page 2 Tim's talking about using good URL structures.... unlike
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-
live-t...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-
web&page=2)

It really is worth the read though. Excellent submission.

~~~
whyleyc
I did some URL hacking and came up with a full-page non-ad version here:

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-
live-t...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-
web&print=yes)

~~~
catshirt
there is also a print button :)

not for nothing of course; i usually look for these first.

~~~
whyleyc
Me too, unfortunately it doesn't work on this article for me though.

------
stupidsignup
Open standards are nice, and Javascript is in many ways better than Java or C#
(but not better than F#, for example). But I am a professional programmer, and
from my point of view Javascript is still a boring mess. Heterogeneity is the
key, and native apps will rule. After all, that's what protocols are for, to
mediate between different entities. I want to be able to create content that
is not limited to technologies imposed by the W3C.

~~~
exit
it's definitely a mess (i distinctly recall recoiling from my keyboard when i
realized an array of numbers was being sorted lexically), but what do you mean
by boring?

~~~
stupidsignup
For example, I continuously found myself often type stuff like var me = this
...some local function body that uses me...

Probably "boring" is the wrong word. "Tiring" is more to the point.

------
vibragiel
I can't help getting shocked by the fact that "the father of the Web" is a 55
year old guy.

~~~
arethuza
Given that he created the original proposal to create web technology in 1990
it's hardly surprising.

~~~
vibragiel
The fact that this shit is just 20 years old is _precisely_ what shocks me, at
times.

~~~
arethuza
Indeed, the fact that I've been using it since late '92 shocks me even more!

~~~
pavs
Well, internet has numbed my ability to be shocked any more.

------
devmonk
Great as always, but Tim says: _Open Standards Drive Innovation_

These standards aren't really that open because of the committees, large
companies, and bureaucracy surrounding them. And major languages we use like
PhP, Python, Ruby, Java, etc. (with exception of ANSI C#, Javascript
(ECMAScript) and some others) weren't successful because they were based on
standards. I use FF (which was touted as standards compliant all during its
transition from Mozilla from Netscape) all the time, but if it weren't for
Netscape folding and IE sucking, it probably would have had much less market
share than it does. I think standards are good, but the red tape slows us
down. Put the specs and their reference implementations on Github (if it
doesn't go down) and fork them at will, then maybe we'll see some real
progress. Successful viruses mutate frequently.

------
raintrees
Would a form of protest against internet filtering take the shape of
misinformation?

For example, it has been argued that the label of Sex Offender has been so
misused, that the lists comprised are becoming of little value. Same for No
Fly lists. This data may be from my (admittedly) very narrow list of sources,
but for the sake of argument, please bear with me.

Using this same idea, adding government websites and commercial company
websites to the COICA blacklists would help devalue such filtering, just as
adding legislature's households to the Hadopi/Digital Economy Act's lists
would devalue them...

If internet access can be moved to the power lines, would it be easier to have
a non-throttled, non-filtered net? No, I guess that would likewise be subject
to legislation-induced choking...

Sigh.

------
Periodic
In the article he states, "today, at its 20th anniversary". This caused me to
double-check the date of publication, which is November 22nd. Ignoring for a
second that TBL has transcended space and time to the point that he can
publish from the future, this is the only place I can find a reference to the
exact day the web went live. Wikipedia's best date is, "by Christmas 1990,
Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web." [1] The next
date it mentions is August 6, 1991, which is when he posted a public summary
of the project.

Does anyone have any good information on a more precise day we could say the
web went live? I want to know when best to have a party.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web>

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Scientific American is a monthly print serial. I assume "today" means the
official December publication date.

------
telemachos
For whatever it's worth, the print button didn't work for me in Chrome and
Safari on OSX 10.6.5.

I was, however, able to get a clean read/printout using Safari's built-in
Reader and then printing from there.

------
brlewis
The web did not spread quickly from the grassroots up. TBL worked hard selling
it. Eventually it had its own momentum, but he makes it sound easy.

