September 20, 1999

A Parent's View of the World Wide Web as It Reaches Adolescence

By STEVE LOHR

very young Internet millionaire owes a debt to Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. An Oxford-educated physicist, he stitched together the core software of the multimedia branch of the Internet while working in the shadow of the Swiss Alps at the CERN physics laboratory outside Geneva nearly a decade ago.

	Ed Quinn for The New York Times
	Tim Berners-Lee, whose fresh approach to the obvious led to the World Wide Web.

Yet perhaps more important is what Berners-Lee did after he designed the Web. He has served as a kind of parental guardian of his creation, working tirelessly to insure that as much as possible the Web remains a public mass-medium in cyberspace, an information thoroughfare that is open to all, Rolls Royces and Rollerbladers alike.

That was his original vision for the Web -- a universal medium for sharing information based on freely available technology instead of being controlled by one or a few powerful companies.

For the past five years, Berners-Lee has pursued that vision as the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, whose mission is to make sure that the fundamental software for identifying and sharing information on the Web is a public standard. Keeping the Web open, of course, has fueled its phenomenal growth, which in turn has created a much larger market for commercial exploitation.

So it is one of the notable ironies of Net history: Because Berners-Lee chose not to cash in on his invention, he has helped expand the business opportunities for America Online, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo and every eager start-up sprinting to join the dot-com gold rush.

In a new book being shipped to bookstores this week, Berners-Lee expresses some irritation at being asked -- especially by incredulous Americans -- why he didn't go for the Internet gold.

"What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person's value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money," he states in "Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web By Its Inventor" (Harper San Francisco). The book was written by Berners-Lee with Mark Fishetti, a freelance writer.

"That suggests disrespect," Berners-Lee adds, "for the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and technology."

Still, Berners-Lee has no hair-shirt aversion for business. He writes that when leaving CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in early 1994 he considered "starting a company with the working name of Websoft, to do much the same as Netscape," whose point-and-click browser software made the Web easily accessible.

Yet that entrepreneurial flirtation was a brief one, and by his own account, it seems clear that Berners-Lee's instincts and abilities lay elsewhere. He is the son of two English mathematicians, Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee, who were computing pioneers in their own right, having worked on a team that designed one of the world's first commercial stored-program computers in the early 1950s. Indeed, in his book, Berners-Lee describes the most "tempting option" in the corporate world was to join "the research group of a large benevolent company."

He did talk to several big companies about joining their research labs, but he eventually decided to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science and found the World Wide Web Consortium.

"I wanted to see the Web proliferate, not sink my life's hours into worrying over a product release," Berners-Lee writes.

At the consortium, he admits, he has restraints as well -- he must strive to be a neutral diplomat in standards debates among members like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Oracle that are often at odds in the marketplace.

Yet the consortium, Berners-Lee decided, was the right place for him. "I'd be free," he writes of his decision, "to really think about what was right for the world, as opposed to what would be best for one commercial interest."

"Weaving the Web" is a book in two parts. The first is essentially a narrative of creation, while the second is Berners-Lee's view of the Web's future.

His description of designing the Web underlines how much innovation is a step-by-step process, using the work of others and putting those building blocks together in new ways. In the case of the Web, the key ingredients were hypertext for linking text in a nonlinear format and the Internet.

"I happened to come along with time, and the right interest and inclination, after hypertext and the Internet had come of age," Berners-Lee writes. "The task left to me was to marry them together."

He came up with the software standards for addressing, linking and transferring multimedia documents over the Internet. They have the shorthand names that are second-nature to computer enthusiasts and even familiar to, if little understood by, millions of Web surfers: URL's (uniform resource locators), HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) and HTML (hypertext mark-up language).

If Berners-Lee seems matter-of-fact about his work, much of the computer science community was dismissive when they first saw it.

"He took a very simple approach," Jim Gray, a leading computer scientist at Microsoft Research, recalled in an interview. "It is fair to say that everyone who saw it thought nothing of it. Very simple, very minimal, anyone could have done it. No big deal.

"Well," Gray continued, "everyone was wrong and no one else did it -- Tim did it."

Berners-Lee's breakthrough, apparently, is proof of the adage that genius is a fresh approach to the obvious. "I like that," Berners-Lee said last week in an interview. "The Web is obvious, after the fact."

Critical to the creative process, in his view, is placing a good mind in an environment rich in the information that might be useful in solving a problem -- a "Web of information," he inevitably calls it.

"Creativity is a Web-like process, it's nonlinear but not random either," he said. "It requires ideas just floating -- that is the state in which the mind can jiggle them into an insight."

Berners-Lee believes that the next stage of the Web, if properly handled, holds the promise of greatly increasing the creative productivity of groups, corporations and of society in general. Whether that potential can be attained is an uncertainty that hinges, he insists, on the evolution of the new technical standards that the hundreds of members of the Web consortium are working to develop and refine.

The Web's first stage, based on HTML, can be thought of as focused on addressing and presenting documents. The stage just beginning to unfold, based on XML (extensible mark-up language) and refinements like RDF (resource description framework), allows the data inside documents to be identified with programming "tags."

Today, a user has to know or find the address of a Web document that contains information he or she wants. But increasingly, the Web should become far more "intelligent" as small programs sometimes called "logic engines" will be able to find the useful data on areas of intellectual inquiry -- finding some facet of Chaucer studies for Ph.D. research, for example, or corporate projects like mapping the relationships and dependencies among people, rivals and suppliers in an industry for competitive analysis.

The next stage of Web technical standards essentially enables computers to talk to each other, so that they do routine and repetitive work involved in everything from homework to shopping. And that leaves people with more time and energy for doing the more creative tasks. The Web, in short, has the capacity to become a much more intelligent information infrastructure.

"Now, we're writing documents that contain logic," Berners-Lee explained. "It's a huge step forward toward a semantic Web, which handles the meaning of data."

Yet what Berners-Lee calls the "XML revolution," he writes, is "both a boon and a threat to the Web dream." The danger, he says, is a Balkanization of the Web -- if companies create their own XML tags that cannot be read by everyone else. If that were to happen, it would no longer be a universal medium of sharing information.

The first line of defense against the threat, Berners-Lee says, is his consortium, as the institutional guardian of the "technical integrity of the Web" -- keeping the standards open.

Which is why, he says, he plans to stay at MIT for the next several years. "It is so important that we get this right that I want to be there and throw my weight," he said.

His creation is still young. And Berners-Lee views it with a mixture of parental pride and concern, and he is not yet willing to let it go unsupervised. "I think of the Web as an adolescent," he said. "It has started realizing it has a new-found power. No one knows if it knows how to use it responsibly. And maturity is a long way off."

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Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

• Tim Berners-Lee Home Page

• World Wide Web Consortium

• W3C: XML