When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free.
Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.
In Australia to promote his book, This is for Everyone, Berners-Lee is reflecting on what his invention has become – and how he and a community of collaborators can put the power of the web back into the hands of its users.
Berners-Lee describes his excitement in the earliest years of the web as “uncontainable”. Approaching 40 years on, a rebellion is brewing among himself and a community of like-minded activists and developers.
“We can fix the internet … It’s not too late,” he writes, describing his mission as a “battle for the soul of the web”.
Berners-Lee traces the first corruption of the web to the commercialisation of the domain name system, which he believes would have served web users better had it been managed by a nonprofit in the public interest. Instead, he says, in the 1990s the .com space was pounced on by “charlatans”.
Hey nonprofiter, why do I still require your permission to address my anime website on my Japanese connection? What is the “public interest” in his view of “like-minded activists”?
Connect point A to B.
I know he didn’t design the web with the blind in mind.
I know he didn’t design the web with the silenced in mind. (btw, a mod proved my point here so perfectly)
I know he didn’t he design the web with kilobytes in mind. (1989 storage prices yikes!)
&btw, where is Tim’s OpenNic TLD?
If you want Domain Names to be unique, you need some organ to coordinate that. Doesn’t have to be about permission, but if I use the same name as someone else, the URI is no longer U and loses all value.
That doesn’t have to be about permission. Ideally, any unclaimed domain could be claimed by anyone (with a possible exception for things like important government domains). You’d just need some organisation to keep a registry and mediate disputes when someone tries to claim that your domain is theirs and they’d like to have it redirect to their site.
I can’t read their minds and haven’tread his book, but I’d say the rest makes it sound like they want to democratise it and harden it against corporate control. Why, do you have any indication to the contrary or are you just throwing accusations?
Isn’t that basically an implementation issue? Like, sure, text isn’t ideal for people who can’t read, but that hardly precludes using it to encode information that some other tools could turn into non-visual formats, nor does it prevent the development of other protocols designed for different content forms than text, as I’m sure you’re aware.
I know I had to learn a whole course about web content accessibility guidelines to make it as easy as possible for people with cognitive, visual or motoric impairments to navigate and use websites, including accommodation for tools like screen readers, making sure table columns and headers are unambiguously associated (even with things like floating headers when you scroll).
It’s not like the medium is actively hostile to blind people. It’s just that a discrete data storage and transmission formats lend themselves well to discrete information like symbols. I don’t know what more you would have expected of him.
Again, I’m not sure that’s an issue on part of the Web. Yes, HTTP by itself has no encryption (which HTTPS added later) or obfuscation of sender and recipient (which is a routing issue, not a content one), and DNS isn’t immune to censorship by providers selectively refusing to resolve certain domains they want to see blocked. At some level, there will always be the human factor.
But you’re just sounding like “He didn’t perfectly account for everything, so he’s an elitist fuck who hates freedom”. By that metric, literally every human is a piece of shit, because none of us are perfect, which makes it a useless metric.
Okay now you’re taking the piss.
Idk, how should I know? But also, why would he need one? Is using one particular service a requirement for championing its cause? Should he have one just to show it off?
Or should he, you know, spend his time and energy trying to raise awareness and devising a way to unfuck things, however and whyever it got fucked up?
Or is he nor pure enough?
Sounds like Tim needs to read theory
Comrade!🫂🫂