The World Wide Web, the graphical interface layer that has brought about the Internet explosion, was born in total apathy. It was invented by Tim-Berners-Lee, then a programmer/physicist at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (Cern) in 1989. He circulated his proposal, which would dramatically change the world, but received no comments back.
He re-circulated details in May and still received only a few comments, so in September, 1990, his boss, Mike Sendall, suggested : "Why not just go ahead?"
Berners-Lee bought a NeXT computer, produced a Web server and graphical browser and editor and the rest is history.
The problem that Berners-Lee was trying to solve was information loss. "Our computers produces paper information," he explains. "The information was electronically available, but we couldn't get at it."
The documentation system at Cern was diverse and operated on a range of different incompatible computers. Documents could be anywhere on the network, in any format or structure, which frustrated the physicists.
Berners-Lee invented the concept of an abstract 'information space' into which a document would be put. Each document would be put. Each document needed a simple identifier that tells a computer where it is to be found. The information space would be populated by lots of different formats.
"Anything can have an identifier, therefore a Web page link can point at anything," says Berners-Lee. "An information space could contain a cheque, shipping list, encyclopaedia or the constitution of the United States."
The World Wide Web, known as the Web, consists of a global series of linked pages, which are both information spaces and provide links to other information spaces. The concept, called 'hypertext', had existed before in software help systems, but only within the same document set.
Berners-Lee recognised that putting the Web into the public domain was important and spent 18 months persuading Cern to sign away their rights to his invention. "For it to be widely adopted, it needed to be developed and extended with impunity," he says. "If I had made the Web into a product, it would have been in somebody's interest to make an incompatible version of it." He points this out without mentioning any names.
Once in the public domain, use of the Web has multiplied by ten each year, in what Berners-Lee describes as a "slow bang". Berners-Lee sees the initial development of the World Wide Web as successively encompassing four separate markets. Web publishing was the first market to take off, creating free public global information, although Berners-Lee points out that it does not have to be free, public or global.
The Internet (private network) market, based on Internet technology, is still developing, allowing people to work together in business processes. The electronic commerce market is about to take off and will be followed by education and training, which he believes is important because of its traditional lack of funding.
Berners-Lee has since left Cern to become the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, known as W3C. He defines the goals of the Web as being to create personal empowerment, to promote social efficiency, understanding and harmony and to exploit computing power in real life. Asked about the future, Berners-Lee believes that the Web is fundamentally a platform for other things to come, but is vague about what they will be. "If we know what the future is, we aren't looking far enough ahead," he believes.
"The more general the Web, the more powerful and diverse the applications can be, but I don't know exactly what they are going to be. The will be powerful, fast and reliable and will cater for their legal implications.
They will be powerful, fast and reliable and will cater for their legal implications. They will be part of society and society will be part of them. We will be able to build whole new worlds, but we must address the type of society we can build in an information space."
Clearly, there is a danger in such a revolutionary change that the Web is bringing about, but Berners-Lee is an optimist. "We are building applications which reflect the values already existing in society," he believes.
"We will upset markets and upset jobs, but we will also create markets and create jobs. We must be mature about how we use it and made sure we continue to hold the values we held before."
His vision is that when the Web is everybody's home, we will still have a collection of personal neighbourhood services, which we value as we do today.
However, we will also have a worldwide electronic directory of products and services, which we will also value. "We can keep our values, but lose the time we spend trailing around for routine shopping and chores," he hopes.
In spite of the unknown replacement for the Web, W3C is working on some more immediate improvements. The "Web of Trust" will provide the ability to sign a document so that any body can ask to whom information belongs and what are the licensing terms for using it. This will be important for both electronic commerce and team-working on the Web.
Jointly with Commerce-Net, an industry forum for electronic commerce, the Joint Electronic Payment Initiative is standardising 30 different protocols for negotiating payments between banks, organisations and individuals.
"We will need several mechanisms to take account of different transaction types," points out Berners-Lee. "For instance, when you buy a house you do a lot of detailed paperwork, but when you buy a newspaper you throw somebody some change and you don't need to know who they are."
The Personal Privacy Profile will allow Web users to choose how much information they give away when they are connected to a Web site.
A new language is being developed which might say "you can have my name and address, but can't give it to anybody else or use it for marketing."
The Web access programme is designed to give access to disabled people, but could also benefit drivers and anybody else who needs to use both hands.
Furthermore, it is encouraging aural style sheets to make it easy for somebody, who cannot read pictures, to follow links. It is also teaching people how to design a form on a Web site that can be filled in by a blind person or by using speech. it will provide a way for a table to explain to speech synthesising browser how to 'read' it.
Whatever shape the replacement for the Web takes, Berners-Lee is optimistic: "it must have everything we currently live and breath and enjoy!"
