The World Wide Web Consortium and Tim Berners-Lee
W3C in 7 points
PDF copy here in case they delete the page...
I've used this list in four of my five most recent projects as a memory jogger for people, usually during the start-up phase when we are looking at the systems architecture and high-level design of the system we are building. I think it is a good organising slide - after all you have to start somewhere, even when your company provides a template Word document to get around the "blank sheet of paper" problem.
Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the CERN web used to be on the W3C site in the late '90s but I haven't been able to find it there for some years now. This is a fascinating document - truly visionary, short and succinct, and a rich vein of ideas to mine in future.
My company was one of the first with a public website in the UK. When Mosaic took off, I looked at the HTTP RFC and thought "Hmmm, he's really not so much innovating as glueing RFC 788 (for Simple Mail Transport Protocol) with its headers and message body onto the rcp addressing system ("rcp trabant:/home/jerry/foo"), and then writing a client to interpret the result based on content type...". So to me, the real genius of Tim Berners-Lee is in his communication skills and organisational capacity - in his ability to get his vision adopted globally via a consensus-driven approach - and in his approach - very PARC-like - of building tools he wanted to use and getting them out there for others to use too.
PDF copy here in case they delete the page...
I've used this list in four of my five most recent projects as a memory jogger for people, usually during the start-up phase when we are looking at the systems architecture and high-level design of the system we are building. I think it is a good organising slide - after all you have to start somewhere, even when your company provides a template Word document to get around the "blank sheet of paper" problem.
Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal for the CERN web used to be on the W3C site in the late '90s but I haven't been able to find it there for some years now. This is a fascinating document - truly visionary, short and succinct, and a rich vein of ideas to mine in future.
My company was one of the first with a public website in the UK. When Mosaic took off, I looked at the HTTP RFC and thought "Hmmm, he's really not so much innovating as glueing RFC 788 (for Simple Mail Transport Protocol) with its headers and message body onto the rcp addressing system ("rcp trabant:/home/jerry/foo"), and then writing a client to interpret the result based on content type...". So to me, the real genius of Tim Berners-Lee is in his communication skills and organisational capacity - in his ability to get his vision adopted globally via a consensus-driven approach - and in his approach - very PARC-like - of building tools he wanted to use and getting them out there for others to use too.
posted by Jerry at 10:08 AM
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