'Testimony of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee
I appear before you today to discuss the future of the World Wide Web. I am offering to you some of my experience of having designed the original foundations of the Web, what I’ve learned from watching it grow and how excited I am to see the challenging developments that I can see in the future of the Web. Since I made the Web it has become something that could not have been designed by a single person or organization, it has become a public resource upon which many individuals, communities, companies and governments depend upon. The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails.... The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. Therefore it is incumbent on all of us to understand what our role is in fostering continued growth, innovation, and vitality of the World Wide Web.
The success of the World Wide Web, itself built on the open Internet, has depended on three critical factors: 1) unlimited links from any part of the Web to any other; 2) open technical standards as the basis for continued growth of innovation applications; and 3) separation of network layers, enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and information applications. Many people take these opportunities for granted. The last decade has seen so many new ecommerce start-ups, some of which have formed the foundations of the new economy that we now expect that the next blockbuster Web site or the new homepage for your kid's local soccer team will just appear on the Web without any difficulty.
How did the Web grow from nothing to the scale it is at today? From a technical perspective, the Web is a large collection of Web pages (written in the standard HTML format), linked to other pages (with the linked documents named using the URI standard), and accessed over the Internet (using the HTTP network protocol). In simple terms, the Web has grown because it's easy to write a Web page and easy to link to other pages. The growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. A current example of the low barriers to reading, writing and linking on the Web is the world of blogs. Blogs hardly existed five years ago, but have become an enormously popular means of expression for everything from politics to local news, to art and science. The Web has not only been a venue for the free exchange of ideas, but also it has been a platform for the creation of a wide and unanticipated variety of new services.
The Web will continue to get better at helping us to integrate and analyze data. Today, the Web is quite effective at helping us to publish and discover documents, but the individual information elements within those documents cannot be handled directly as data. Today you can see the data with your browser, but can't get other computer programs to manipulate or analyze it without going through a lot of manual effort yourself. As this problem is solved, we can expect that Web as a whole to look more like a large database or spreadsheet, rather than just a set of linked documents.
We ensure that both technological protocols and social conventions respect basic values and that the Web remains a universal platform: independent of any specific hardware device, software platform, language, culture, or disability. That the Web does not become controlled by a single company -- or a single country.
My Response to the Testimony
I believe that ‘Sir Timothy Burners-Lee’ has made some very valuable and intriguing points about the way in which the World Wide Web has grown and influenced our society. The Web is a necessity in many of our everyday lives whether you use it for communication, इन्फोर्मतियो even shopping. The Web will continue to grow and get better and better but this also could be dangerous because everyone will then generate all their trust towards the internet which could malfunction. On the other hand it is a great invention that will guide everyone on where they need to go for information and feed everyone’s lust for knowledge.
I appear before you today to discuss the future of the World Wide Web. I am offering to you some of my experience of having designed the original foundations of the Web, what I’ve learned from watching it grow and how excited I am to see the challenging developments that I can see in the future of the Web. Since I made the Web it has become something that could not have been designed by a single person or organization, it has become a public resource upon which many individuals, communities, companies and governments depend upon. The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails.... The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. Therefore it is incumbent on all of us to understand what our role is in fostering continued growth, innovation, and vitality of the World Wide Web.
The success of the World Wide Web, itself built on the open Internet, has depended on three critical factors: 1) unlimited links from any part of the Web to any other; 2) open technical standards as the basis for continued growth of innovation applications; and 3) separation of network layers, enabling independent innovation for network transport, routing and information applications. Many people take these opportunities for granted. The last decade has seen so many new ecommerce start-ups, some of which have formed the foundations of the new economy that we now expect that the next blockbuster Web site or the new homepage for your kid's local soccer team will just appear on the Web without any difficulty.
How did the Web grow from nothing to the scale it is at today? From a technical perspective, the Web is a large collection of Web pages (written in the standard HTML format), linked to other pages (with the linked documents named using the URI standard), and accessed over the Internet (using the HTTP network protocol). In simple terms, the Web has grown because it's easy to write a Web page and easy to link to other pages. The growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. A current example of the low barriers to reading, writing and linking on the Web is the world of blogs. Blogs hardly existed five years ago, but have become an enormously popular means of expression for everything from politics to local news, to art and science. The Web has not only been a venue for the free exchange of ideas, but also it has been a platform for the creation of a wide and unanticipated variety of new services.
The Web will continue to get better at helping us to integrate and analyze data. Today, the Web is quite effective at helping us to publish and discover documents, but the individual information elements within those documents cannot be handled directly as data. Today you can see the data with your browser, but can't get other computer programs to manipulate or analyze it without going through a lot of manual effort yourself. As this problem is solved, we can expect that Web as a whole to look more like a large database or spreadsheet, rather than just a set of linked documents.
We ensure that both technological protocols and social conventions respect basic values and that the Web remains a universal platform: independent of any specific hardware device, software platform, language, culture, or disability. That the Web does not become controlled by a single company -- or a single country.
My Response to the Testimony
I believe that ‘Sir Timothy Burners-Lee’ has made some very valuable and intriguing points about the way in which the World Wide Web has grown and influenced our society. The Web is a necessity in many of our everyday lives whether you use it for communication, इन्फोर्मतियो even shopping. The Web will continue to grow and get better and better but this also could be dangerous because everyone will then generate all their trust towards the internet which could malfunction. On the other hand it is a great invention that will guide everyone on where they need to go for information and feed everyone’s lust for knowledge.
2 comments:
i CAN SEE YOU HAVE DONE THE WORK BUT i CAN'T READ IT!
Sort it out Dominic.
DW
update time dominic.
dw
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