Tim Berners-Lee: Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter
Tim Berners-Lee: Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter
Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s open letter to mark the occasion of the Web’s 35th Birthday.
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Why does this guy think he invented the web? I don't know enough to say he didn't, but why does he think so?
Wasn't it a multi-person/org effort? Isn't that why everyone laughed at Al Gore when he implied the same? After going on about the need to decentralize, this guy wants to take the credit himself?
I mean... He made www, HTML, URLs and HTTP. Literally everything you used to write your comment he was involved in. I'm sure he didn't do it entirely alone, we always build on what came before us. But it's not inaccurate to call him the inventor of the Web.
Also remember the Web is not the same as the Internet.
What's the difference between the two?
The "web" part runs atop the "Internet" part, where web is at the application layer (those lines can blur on that), and internet is the lower levels of the OCI Model. See image.
Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away
The World Wide Web is more or less the Internet as most users see it - HTML documents located via URLs shared over the HTTP protocol. But that's just one specific protocol used for sharing a specific kind of content (hypertext). It turns out you can do a whole lot with that, hence the ubiquity of the Web.
But the Internet as a whole is broader than that. There are other protocols, other content to share, other ways to locate data. For a down-to-earth familiar example, just consider any online multiplayer game. You're using the Internet to communicate to the game's servers to play the game, but that Internet traffic is certainly not part of the Web.
When you're playing an MMORPG you're not using the web, but you're using the Internet. The Internet is like the postal service relaying stuff, but the stuff can be of different kinds.
The Web is websites (HTML pages served over HTTP, which link to each other via hyperlinks). The Internet is websites plus email, VoIP, IRC, Usenet, bittorrent, game servers, FTP, SSH, and everything else that isn't a website.
Web is just the website part. Like web pages you see in the web browser. Tim Berners Lee invented this part.
Internet encompasses more things. For example, sending texts in some mobile app. You’re not necessarily seeing a web page. You’re just sending data from your device to some other device in the world.
Or to be more technical: web is HTTP. Internet is that and everything else (like FTP, SMTP, SSH, etc).
Or more simply: The internet is just the network. The web is one of the handful of "apps" that run directly using that network. It just also happens to be able to run apps of its own these days and is a pretty "killer" one at that :)
(Edit: please disregard the wrong link that summoned the bot below. It's been fixed. And I do not have a Balatro problem...)
Great way my professor explained to me with:
Internet is a network of computers, to send data to each other.
Web is a network of documents, the revolutionary concept about it was the fact it can be on your computer or others computers and still be connected via URLs.
Tim's name is the only one on the original html rfc. He is also a contributor on the httpd rfcs.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1866
So as far as content creation is concerned, yes he invented it. Html markup made it very easy for non-technical people to easily create their own web pages. That we no longer do that as individuals is the main point he is making. The original intent of the tool has been taken over by marketing and capitalism.
Before his work we communicated and shared via ftp, telnet, usenet, gopher, smtp, and irc.
He developed HTML, HTTP, URL, the first browser and the first Webserver...
Al Gore claimed to invent the internet.
Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web. He did this through the creation of technologies foundational to web browsers, including the URL, HTTP, and HTML. That he invented them isn’t controversial.
Al Gore claimed to invent the internet.
Al Gore claimed to be involved in approving the funding which resulted in the creation of the Internet.
When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part): "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
-Snopes
His choice of words was poor and makes it sound like alone “took the initiative in creating the internet.” Whatever he really meant, his wording makes it sound like he’s claiming a bit more credit for his role than it merits.
It's also worth reading an open letter from Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf on the issue. While no one person invented the Internet, those two would be towards the top of the list of people who were involved in inventing it.
https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt
tl;dr: Al Gore was among the first policy makers to really understand its importance, and pushed for legislation that got it into people's homes. Technical people tend to scoff at politicians a lot, but good policy making is important. The Internet would not have taken off the same way without Al Gore.
"Took initiative in creating the internet" sounds a lot to me like making sure it happened (which is exactly the role a government official should have; funding and policy). It's very different than claiming he invented it.
Well, if you trust Wikipedia as a source, the second paragraph of the article on the World Wide Web starts out:
"The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee..."
You are confusing the Internet and the web. You should look it up.
Dunning Kruger in the house .
He made the web as we know it. There were a few other projects that were reaching similar goals and were considered part of the "world wide web" at the time but have been largely forgotten. Gopher was the most popular for a time, and there were a few others that were barely more than research projects. Going by peak deployment numbers, Gemini might now be the second most popular web technology ever (maybe; I haven't seen a credible breakdown or anything, just guessing).
In any case, Tim Berners-Lee made HTTP and HTML, and that combination is the basis for the modern web. So much so that we tend to talk about it as the web.