I feel that after a while if I answer the same questions again, I will start answering rather mechanically, and will forget important steps, and after a while it won't make sense. So I have put a few answers from my outgoing mail in this list to save everyone time. But this list is (c) TBL so don't quote directly without permission. Thanks.
Q: What is your opinion on 'Cyber Squatting' for domain names? (-Lia Kim)
Donmain names are a scarce resource - one of the few scarce resources in cyberspace. I have little sympathy for those who scoop these up with the hope of speculating on their value. This is not one of the most helpful activities on the net. There are those who use their energy for the purposes of furthering the technology or the content or the world in some way, but just sitting on a domain name without using it in order to cash in later deos not seem to me a constructive .
Q: I understand you invented the Internet....
Sorry, not me! I was lucky enough to invent the Web at at time when the Internet already existed - and had for a decade and a half. If you are looking for fathers of the Internet, try Vint Cerf and Bob Khan who defined the "Internet Protocol" (IP) by which packets are sent on from one computer to another until they reach their destination. See:
Vint explains the timing:
"The DESIGN of Internet was done in 1973 and published in 1974. There ensued about 10 years of hard work, resulting in the roll out of Internet in 1983. Prior to that, a number of demonstrations were made of the technology - such as the first three-network interconnection demonstrated in November 1977 linking SATNET, PRNET and ARPANET in a path leading from Menlo Park, CA to University College London and back to USC/ISI in Marina del Rey, CA."
David Clarke, of MIT's LCS, sometimes refered to as "father of TCP", is another one I can point to who put in the work in the 1970s which made the Web possible in the 1990s.
Q: What is the difference between the Net and the Web?
The Internet ('Net) is a network of networks. Basically it is made from computers and cables. What Vint Cerf and Bob Khan did was to figure out how this could be used to send around little "packets" of information. As Vint points out, a packet is a bit like a postcard with a simple address on it. If you put the right address on a packet, and gave it to any computer which is connectd as part of the Net, each computer would figure out which cable to send it down next so that it would get to its destination. That's what the Internet does. It delivers packets - anywhere in the world, normally well under a second.
Lots of different sort of programs use the Internet: electronic mail, for example, was around long before the global hypertext system I invented and called the World Wide Web ('Web). Now, videoconferencing and streamed audio channels are among other things which, like the Web, encode information in different ways and use different languages between computers ("protocols") to do provide a service.
The Web is an abstract (imaginary) space of information. On the Net, you find computers -- on the Web, you find document, sounds, videos,.... information. On the Net, the connections are cables between computers; on the Web, connections are hypertext links. The Web exists because of programs which communicate between computers on the Net. The Web could not be weithout the Net. The Web made the net useful because people are really interested in information (not to mention knowledge and wisdom!) and don't really want to have know about computers and cables.
Questions below derived from those asked by Taiwan's Commonwealth magazine
Q: What did you have in mind when you first developed the Web?
From A Short Personal History of the Web:
The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.
Q: Is it true that you have had mixed emotions about, if I may, not cashing in on the Web?
Not really. It was simply that had the technology been proprietory, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.
Q: Are you happy with what the World Wide Web has turned out so far?
That is a big question. I am very happy at the incredible richness of material on the Web, and in the diversity of ways in which it is being used. There are many parts of the original dream which are not yet implemented. For example, very few people have and easy, intuitive tool for putting their thoughts into hypertext. And much of reasons for, and meaning of, links on the web is lost. But these can and I think will change.
Q: What do you think of the commercial turf wars going on the Web?
There has always been a huge competition to come out with the best Web technology. This has followed from the fact that the standards, being open, allow anyone to experiment with new extensions. This produces the threat of fragmentation into many Webs, and that threat brings the compaines to the W3C to come to agreement about how to go forward together. It is the tension of this competion and th eneed for standard which drives W3C forward at such a speed.
Q: What should they lay person be aware of as the Web evolves?
We should all learn to be information smart: to understand when a Web site, or a piece of software, or an Internet Service provider plan, is giving us biased information. We should learn to distiguish qulaity informationa nd quality links. As technology evolves, and machine-understandable information on the Web becomes available, we should be aware of the sudden changes which large-scale machine processing might have on our businesses.
Q: How could the Web be a more interactive, creative medium?
Nothing can be perfect, but the Web could be a lot better. It would help is we had easy hypertext editors which let us make links between documents with the mouse. It would help is everyone with web access also had some space they can write to -- and that is changing nowadays as a lot of ISPs give web space to users. It would help is we had an easy way of controlling access to files on the web so tha we could safely use it for private, group, or family information without fear of the wrong people being able to access it.
Q: You talked about the need for a metadata language. Can you tell us laymen what it is?
"Meta" is used with anything which is about itself - so a metabook would be a book about books, and metadata is data about data. On the Web, this means all sorts of information about information: its ownership, authorship, distribution rights, privacy policy, and so on. These needs are driving us to make ways of putting informatio non the web designed for computers to be able to understand. Web pages at the moment in HTML are designed to be read by humans. In the future, some Web pages will be in "RDF" -- Resource Description Framework. This will be read by computer programs which will help us organise ourselfves and our data and possibly everything we do.
Q: Are you worried about privacy on the Web?
When it comes to privacy, my personal view is that the consumer needs some legal or regulatory protection by default. The W3C has a project called "P3P" for privacy which will allow a user to control if and how information is given away to a Web server. P3P will allow Web sites to specify their privacy policy and users to automatically be warned about sites whose policies they don't like. See the P3P project.
Q. Do you shop online? What do you think about the E-Commerce?
Yes, I buy a lot of things online myself. I think that Web shopping as it is is only the tip of a huge larger change which will come when I can find things and compare priceses automatically, and when electronic financial instruments are commonplace.
Q: Peter Drucker has predicted that information technology will bring about the demise of the university as currently constituted. Do you share this view? What changes will the Web help bring to education?
I hope that educators will pool their reseources and create a huge supply of online materials. I hope much of this will be availble freely to those especially in developing countries who may not have access to it any other way. Then I think we will see two things. One will be that keeping that web of material up to date will take a lot of time and effort - it will seem like more effort than craeting it in the first place. The other is that we will see how essential people, and their wisdom, and their personal interactions, are to the educational process. A university is a lot more than its library.
Q: How do you see the web shape the new, knowledge-based economy?
The Web is simply a name for all the information you can get online. So it will be the abstract place where the knowledge-based economy happens. Already the W3C staff team works with three international sites, many offices, and several people working from or near home. The Web will open up new forms of business altogether, and make us rethink the way we run existing businesses. It can turn bureaucracy over to machines, and let people get on with the creativity. It will help us see where we each fit, with our own experience, talents and passions, among the millions of other people and theirs. It can help us work together more effectively, remove misunderstanding, and bring about peace and harmony on a global scale. But it can only do these things is we learn to use it wisely, and we think very carefully about both the technology and the laws we make or change around it.
Q: Do you have any examples of the early web which we could compare with current webs?
A: (1997): I don't have a very early 1990,91 snapshot but there is a snapshot of our web as of November 1992, much of which dates from earlier. (Some pages for some reason don't work with Netscape 3.0 for some reason it doesn't the old HTML for some reason or perhaps it just has a bug. They do work with Internet explorer 4.0)
There is a list of design issues and a trip report on the 1990 European Conference on HyperText and a note on the "state of standardization" (!) and an example of the use of the web as a collaborative tool in some shared notes on the topology of the web wrote and Jean-Francois Groff annotated .
The pages will look much the same as they did originally, although the actual style sheet I used as a default with the original browser/editor you can see converted approximately into a CSS style sheet if you read my Style Guide for Online Hypertext with a CSS-compliant browser such as IE 4.0.
Some of the links in the historical stuff have been accidentally saved (much later) absolute incorrect links -- if you really want to follow them you can see where they ought to have gone by stripping of the prefix.
(Based on replies to David Brake, "New Scientist",1997/9)
Q: Why did you study physics?
A (1997) : My parents are both mathematicians: they actually met while working on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. My mother has been dubbed the "first commercial computer programmer" as she went with the machine when it was installed on the customer site. So we played with 5 hole paper tape, and learned to enjoy mathematics wherever it cropped up, and learned that it cropped up everywhere.
Later on, my hobby was electronics. When I left school, obviously I was going to do something in maths, science and/or engineering. Emanuel school was programmed to send people to Oxford, where the subjects very narrow. I took physics thinking it would be a sort of compromise
between maths and electronics, theory and practice. It turned out not to be that, but to be something special and wonderful in itself. Physics was fun, and in fact a good preparation for creating a global system. In physics, you learn to think up some simple mathematical rule on a microscopic scale, which when scaled will explain the macroscopic behaviour. On the Internet, we try to dream up computer protocols which when extrapolated to the macroscopic will produce an information space with properties we would like.
Q: Why didn't you stay on to do a PhD in physics?
A: After undergraduate physics, you have a reasonable training in logical thought and common sense, an ounce of philosophy and not enough maths to study physics. I didn't meet anyone who was actually doing physics research at the postgrad level and was really excited about it. I might have been more tempted to take a PhD if I had had a role model who did have that excitement.
What seemed much more exciting was the possibility of that electronic hobby really taking off. The microprocessor was just hitting the world. I got an early M6800 evaluation kit, and built myself a rack-based 8-bit system. I had already while in college slowly put together a display unit out of an old TV, bits of TTL logic and junk from the Tottenham Court Road. I joined Plessey Data Systems: of the telecom companies doing the "milk round" interviews the Poole (Dorset) site won hands down in terms of the sea and the countryside!
Those who got into designing microprocessor hardware and software then rode the crest of the wave of the deployment of microprocessor technology. Compared with TTL, a microprocessor gave one that feeling of unbounded opportunity which had everyone excited. Later , the thought of building an abstract information space on top of it all had the same sort of kick.
Q: What role does the W3c play in setting standards?
A: (1996) W3C's mission is to realize the full potential of the web, by bringing its members and others together in a neutral forum. The W3C has to move rapidly (time measured in "web years" = 2.6 months) so it cannot afford to have a traditional Standards process. What has happened to date has been that W3C has, by providing a neutral forum and facilitation, and also with the help of its technically astute staff, got a consensus among the developers about a way to go. Then, this has been all that has been needed: once a common specification has been prepared and a general consensus among the experts is seen, companies have been running with that ball. The specifications have become de facto standards. This has happened with for example HTML TABLES, and PICS. Now in fact we have decided to start using not a full standards process, but a process of formal review by the W3C membership, in order to draw attention to specifications, and to cement their status a little. After review by members, the specifications will be known as W3C process.
(See process of review)
Q:What do you make of the branding attempt of companies, by putting little icons on their home pages saying, "best when viewed with Microsoft Explorer, or Navigator?"
This comes from an anxiousness to use the latest proprietary features which have not been agreed by all companies. It is done either by those who have an interest in pushing a particular company, or it is done by those who are anxious to take the community back to the dark ages of computing when a floppy from a PC wouldn't read on a Mac, and a Wordstar document wouldn't read in Word Perfect, or an EBCDIC file wouldn't read on an ASCII machine. It's fine for individuals whose work is going to be transient and who aren't worried about being read by anyone.
However, corporate IT strategists should think very carefully about committing to the use of features which will bind them into the control of any one company. The web has exploded because it is open. It has developed so rapidly because the creative forces of thousands of companies are building on the same platform. Binding oneself to one company means one is limiting one's future to the innovations that one company can provide.
Q: What role do standards play in today's hyper competitive, and fast-changing marketplace?
A: Common specifications are essential. This competition, which is a great force toward innovation, would not be happening if it were not building on a base of HTTP, URL and HTML standards. These forces are strong. They are the forces which, by their threat to tear the web apart into fragmented incompatible pieces, force companies toward common specifications.
Q:Is it overly ambitious to think standards can be set and adhered to? Are they a relic of a kinder, gentler era?
A: Do you think that incompatibility, the impossibility of transferring information between different machines, companies, operating systems, applications, was "kinder, gentler"? It was a harsh, frustrating era. The Web has brought a kindness and gentleness for users, a confidence in technology which is a balm for IT departments everywhere. It has bought new hope. As a result, great things are happening very fast. So this is a faster, more exciting era.
Companies know that it only interesting to compete over one feature until everyone can do it. After that, that feature becomes part of the base, and everyone wants to do it in one, standard, way. The smart companies are competing on the implementations: the many other aspects such as functionality, speed, ease of use and support which differentiate products.
June 96Q: What sort of computer do you use?
A: At work, I have two 21" monitors attached to either An HP VectraXW runing NT or an HP712/80 running NeXTStep . At home I have a duplicate NT system and IP over ISDN into MIT. On the road, I currently use a ThinkPad 760CD or Thinkpad 540.
Everywhere, I used a PSION 3a until my second one broke, for notes and agenda and phone numbers.
Q: How in fact do you spell World Wide Web?
A: It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym is three separate "W"s. There are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in some places been spelled with a hyphen but the official way is without. Yes, I know that "worldwide" is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web is three words.
I use "Web" with a capital W to indicate that it is an abbreviation for "World Wide Web". Hence, "What a tangled web he wove on his Web site!".
Often, WWW is written and read as W3, which is quicker to say. In particular, the World Wide Web consortium is W3C, never WWWC.
Q: Why did you call it WWW?
A: Looking for a name for a global hypertext system, an essential element I wanted to stress was its decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to be global of course. ( I had noticed that projects find it useful to have a signature letter, as the Zebra project at CERN which started all its variables with "Z". In fact by the time I had decided on WWW, I had written enough code using global variables starting with "HT" for hypertext that W wasn't used for that.). Alternatives I considered were "Mine of information" ("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste) and "The Information Mine ("Tim", even more egocentric!), and "Information Mesh" (too like "Mess" though its ability to describe a mess was a requirement!). Karen Sollins at MIT now has a Mesh project.
I wrote in 1990 the first GUI browser, and called it "WorldWideWeb". It ran on the NeXT computer. (I much later renamed the application Nexus to avoid confusion between the first client and the abstract space itself).
WorldWideWeb was a graphical point-and-click browser with mode-free editing and link creation. It used style sheets, and multiple fonts, sizes, and justification styles. It would download and display linked images, diagrams, sounds annimations and movies from anything in the large NeXTStep standard repertoire.
Pei Wei, student at Stanford, then wrote "ViolaWWW" for unix; some students at Helsinki University of Technology wrote "Erwise" for unix; and Tony Johnson of SLAC wrote "Midas" for unix. Pei Wei has passed though history unnoticed among others whose work is not mentioned in the histories, even though there was a year or so when Viola was the best way to browse the web, was the engine driving the installation of new servers, and the recommended browser at CERN for example.
Many people, incidentally, saw the Web for the first time by telnetting into info.CERN.ch, which gave them a crude but functional line mode interface. This was the second browser, a text-based browser, called the "line mdoe"browser, or "www", and written by CERN student Nicola Pellow. Many people imagined that that was all there was to the web. As one journalist wrote "The Web is a way of finding information by typing numbers" as links were numbered on the page. It was only in the community of people who use NeXT computers that the Web could be seen as a point-and-click space of hypertext.
As I understand it, Marc Andreessen at NCSA was shown ViolaWWW by a colleague (David Thompson?) at NCSA. Marc downloaded Midas and tried it out. He and Eric Bina then wrote their own browser for unix from scratch. Later, several other folks at NCSA joined the team to port the idea to Mac and PC. As they did, Tom Bruce at Cornell was writing "Cello" for the PC which came out neck-and-neck with Mosaic on the PC.
Marc and Eric did a number of very important things. They made a browser which was easy to install and use. They were the first one to get inline images working - to that point browsers had had varieties of fonts and colors, but pictures were displayed in separate windows. This made web pages much sexier. Most importantly, Marc followed up his and Eric's coding with very fast 24hr customer support, really addressing what it took to make the app easy and natural to use, and trivial to install. Other apps had other things going for them. Viola, for example, was more advanced in many ways, with downloaded applets and animations way back then - very like HotJava was later. But Mosaic was the easiest step onto the Web for a beginner, and so was a critical element of the Web explosion.
Marc marketed Mosaic hard on the net, and NCSA hard elsewhere, trying hard to brand the WWW and "Mosaic": "I saw it on Mosaic" etc. When Marc and Jim Clark first started their start-up they first capitalized on the Mosaic brand, but NCSA fought for it and won. When the "Netscape" brand appeared, people realised the difference between the general "World Wide Web"concept and specific software.
Q. Have your first ideas in regard to the Web been influenced by any specific work or published paper like Vanevar Bush´s "As we my think", a publication of Doug Engelbart or Ted Nelson?
A. There wasn't a direct line. I did come across Ted's work while I was working on the WWW -- after my "Enquire" program (1980) but during my reading up on hypertext - probably between March 89 and September 1990. Not sure.. Of course by 1989 there was hypertext as a common word, hypertext help everywhere, so Ted's basic idea had been (sort of) implemented and I came across it though many indirect routes.
I came across Ted's name first of course. Then I ordered "Litterary Machines", and I remember I was late paying him as he didn't take credit cards or Swiss cheques - I paid him in August 1992 cash in person in Sausolito.
I came across Vannevar Bush's article first in the documentation of Digital Equipment Corporation's "Memex" project which became "Linkworks" for VMS. I don't remember when that came out. Great paper.
Doug Englebart's work was the closest to the Web design -- when I saw that the first time I was amazed. He had even used the hash sign as a delimiter for the address within a document (I guess like me by analogy with an appartment number). Doug's stuff is unbelievable. You have best to see the video of him demonstrating it or his demo of a recent smalltalk re-implementation. I saw the latter at the Edinburg Hypertext conference ECHT 94.
Q: Any people who personally helped you get to where you are today?
A: I think the list would be too long to mention. Everyone who was fun and encouraging, starting with my parents. On the professional side, here are a few.
The Maths teacher at Emanuel, Frank Grundy, who conveyed the excitement of the subject with a twinkle of his eye, can make numerical approximations in his head faster than we could work it out longhand, and would throw in a teaser question into his conversation to puzzle anyone who thought they had figured the subject out. And Daffy Pennel who also couldn't contain his excitement for the subject.
Unlike most people at Oxford I had one tutor for almost all the work. John Moffat has a vary rare talent for being able to understand not only the physics itself, but also my tangled misguided attempts at it, and then showing me in my terms using my strange symbols and vocabulary where I had gone wrong. Many people can only explain the world from their own point of view.
At CERN, I was recruited by Peggie Rimer who taught me, among other things, how to write a standards document. Ben Segal was a mentor for my RPC project at CERN, and was a sole evangelist for Internet protocols at CERN long before they were adopted. Ben gave me a lot of moral support in the later WWW days too. A few years later, Mike Sendall was my boss who has a great combination of human warmth and technical depth, and actually allowed me unofficially to write the WWW programs. And then everyone across the Internet who thought the Web was a neat idea and worked on it after hours actually built it.
The web today is a medium for communication between people, using computers as a largely invisible part of the infrastructure. One of the long-term goals of the consortium is "Automatability", the ability for computers to make some sense of the information and so help us in our task. It has been the goal of mankind for so long that machines should help us in more useful ways than they do at present, help us solve some of those human problems. Maybe this is one of the many ideas (like hypertext) which the web's great scale will allow to work where it did not achieve critical mass on a small scale before. So there are groups looking at a web of knowledge representation. It could be that some scientific field will be the first to be sufficiently disciplined to input its data not just as cool hypertext, but in a machine-readable form, allowing programs to wander the globe analysing and surmising.
The W3 Consortium started to address this goal with its recent workshop on Collaboration on the Web. The ability of machines to process data on the web for scientific purposes such as checking a scientist's private experimental data against public databases, require databases to be available not only in a raw machine-readable form, but also labelled in a machine readable way as to what they are.
The knowledge engineering field has to learn how to be global, and the web has to learn knowledge engineering, but in the end this might be a way in which again the scientific field leads the world into something very powerful, and a new paradigm shift.
Q: How did you come to arrive at the idea of WWW?
A: I arrived at the web because the "Enquire" (E not I) program -- short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, named after a ?victorian? book of that name full of all sorts of useful advice about anything -- was something I found really useful for keeping track of all the random associations one comes across in Real Life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn't. It was very simple but could track those associations which would sometimes develop into structure as ideas became connected, and different projects become involved with each other.
I was using Enquire myself, and realized that (a) it would fulfill my obligation to the world to describe what I was doing if everyone else could get at the data, and (b) it would make it possible for me to check out the other projects in the lab which I could chose to use or not if only their designers had used Enquire and I had access.
Now, the first version of enquire allowed you to make links between files (on one file system) just as easily as between nodes within one file. (It stored many nodes in one database file). The second version, a port from NORD to PC then VMS, would not allow external links.
This proved to be a debilitating problem. To be constrained into database enclosures was too boring, not powerful enough. The whole point about hypertext was that (unlike most project management and documentation systems) it could model a changing morass of relationships which characterized most real environments I knew (and certainly CERN). Only allowing links within distinct boxes killed that. One had to be able to jump from software documentation to a list of people to a phone book to an organizational chart to whatever .. as you can with the web today. The test rule was that if I persuaded two other projects to use it, and they described their systems with it, and then later at any point a module,person etc in one project used something from another project, that you would be able to add the link and the two webs would become one with no global change -- no "flag day" involving the merging of two databases into one, no scaling problems as the number of connected things grew. Hence the W3 design.
The same lesson applies now to the webs of trust we will be building with linked certificates.
So the requirement was for "external" links to be just as easy to make as "internal" links. Which meant that links had to be one way.
(There was also a requirement that the web should be really easy to add links to, but though that was true in the prototype we are only now starting to see betas of good commercial web editors now.)
This was an interview in Internet world by Kris Herbst. His questions are his (c) of course. Slightly edited.
IW: What did you think of the first WWW'94 conference? TBL: Great! It had a unique atmosphere, as there were people from all walks of life brought together by their excitement about the Web. As it was the first one, they hadn't met before, so it was a bit unique. It was very oversubscribed, as you know, so the next one will have to be a lot bigger. IW: Can you tell us something about your early life, and how those experiences might have influenced you later as you developed WWW? TBL: That's the first time I've been asked to trace WWW history back that far! I was born in London, England. My parents met while developing the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially, and I grew up playing with five-hole paper tape and building computers out of cardboard boxes. Could that have been an influence? Later on I studied physics as a kind of compromise between mathematics and engineering. As it turned out, it wasn't that compromise, but it was something special in its own right. Nevertheless, afterward I went straight into the IT industry where more things seemed to be happening. So I can't really call myself a physicist. But physicists spend a lot of time trying to relate macroscopic behavior of systems to microscopic laws, and that is the essence of the design of scalable systems. So physics was probably an influence. IW: What led you to conceive the WWW? TBL: I dabbled with a number of programs representing information in a brain-like way. Some of the earlier programs were too abstract and led to hopelessly undebuggable tangles. One more practical program was a hypertext notebook I made for my own personal use when I arrived at CERN. I found I needed it just to keep track of the -- how shall I say -- flexible? creative? -- way new parts of the system, people and modules were added on and connected together. The project I'd worked on just before starting WWW was a real-time remote procedure call, so that gave me some networking background. Image Computer Systems did a lot of work with text processing and communications -- I was a director before coming to CERN. IW: What elements in your background or character helped you to conceive WWW as a way to keep track of what was happening at CERN? TBL: Elements of character?! Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true, and the tendency to miss lunch. The former two probably helped. I think they are called Attention Deficiency Disorder now. ;-) IW: Do you have some favorite Web sites for browsing? TBL: (Sigh) I wish I did, but I hardly spend any time browsing. Historically, I appreciate the people who were first and showed others how things could be -- Franz Hoesel's Vatican Library, of course, Steve Putz's map server, lots more. IW: How do you feel about the fact that WWW promises to generate large amounts of money for some persons? TBL: If it's good, people will want to buy it, and money is they way they vote on what they want. I believe that system is the best one we have, so if it's right, sure people are going to make money. People will make money building software, selling information, and more importantly doing all kinds of "real" business, which happens to work much better because the Web is there to make their work easier. The web is like paper. It doesn't constrain what you use it for: you have to be able to use it for all of the information flow of normal life. My priority is to see it develop and evolve in a way which will hold us in good stead for a long future. If I, and CERN, hadn't had that attitude, there probably wouldn't be a web now. Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy.
Q: I´m a student of visual communications and asked myself why links are blue. I found some answers that might be, for example blue is a color of learning, but i´m not sure what is right. Is there any reason, why links are colored blue ?
There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: its just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browers went color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors.
My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colours but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.
One of the nicest link rendidtions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area.
No, I can't. What is on the web on this page and my home page is all there is. Please do no email me asking for more information for school projects, etc. Thank you for your understanding.
