Tim Berners-Lee, the software engineer who invented the World Wide Web, has become its honest broker in big disputes. Bill Thompson talks to him about his new role
By BILL THOMPSON
TIM Berners Lee is relaxed and approachable. This is rather surprising given his current job at the centre of one of the nastiest battles for market domination ever seen in the computing industry.
As director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web's English inventor is the "honest broker" between all the competing interests driving the Web forward, and the competition is becoming more intense every day.
The consortium sets the standards for the Web, including the language in which documents are written (HyperText Mark-up Language, or HTML) and the way they are sent over the Internet and intranets (HyperText Transfer Protocols, or HTTP).
Even Microsoft and Netscape - both members - have to take note when the consortium makes a pronouncement, although this does not stop them introducing competitive "extensions" to standards, as Netscape has done with frames and Microsoft's Internet Explorer with its marquees.
Berners Lee is acutely aware of the Web's commercial importance, and of the pressure on companies to make changes to the standards in search of some competitive advantage. But he believes that it must remain standards based and open to everyone. He also knows where the consortium fits in. "It's absolutely vital to the credibility of the consortium that it is vendor neutral," he says. "It has to be the neutral rock which exists after all the proprietary wars have come and gone."
One result of this is that he will not endorse or criticise individual products or companies. Another is that his views are taken very seriously by the industry. "In September 1995 I gave a talk at the Boston Web conference," he explains. "I said how crazy it was to have your personal stuff in a desktop that covers the whole screen, and the whole rest of the planet in a little box that's called a browser. And I said that these two interfaces should be merged together. And then shortly later it came out that it was Microsoft's strategy that this was going to happen.
It may have taken some time for the strategy to turn into product - the new release of Internet Explorer, version 4.0, which will achieve this goal, isn't scheduled until early next year - but the responsiveness is clear. "I'm very happy that they are going that way" is all he will say, although his face reveals that he would have liked some small acknowledgement from Microsoft that they had been listening to him.
A constant theme in all of his talks and writing is the passive nature of today's World Wide Web. In his original vision the Web had been two way readers were to be able to adds or amend documents, building a single global information system. He believes it should be as easy to write material as it is to read it, and that the television model - where "readers" are "viewers" is the wrong one.
"We all want to spend a certain amount of time being passive receivers," he says, "but it's been overestimated. The dial up service providers thought they were going to provide online access to all sorts of information - they were wrong. They put mail and chat in as a sideshow and they stole the show - if you ask people why they are up late, it's because they are communicating with other human beings."
At the moment, most Web browsers are read only, and even those that let the reader edit are "clunky", he admits. "Some get closer because they let you browse and then edit in place and save the result - the document lives in Web space. But it needs to become much more slick," he says.
"What I really want is to read a document, then highlight a word and hit a key to have a new linked document, which I can then edit and save. The old document gets the link, the new document gets my content. It doesn't have to be sophisticated."
. Stanford University had the first US Web server, in May 1991. There were about 50 known Web servers in January 1993. Such is the Web's growth since then that the number of Web sites found by the Netcraft Server Survey jumped from 18,957 in its first survey, during July 1995, to 1,002,612 in its latest survey, completed last Thursday.
. The W3 Consortium's site (http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW includes some of Berners Lee's original proposals for the Web.
On the recent issue of copyrighting URLs, the addresses of documents on the World Wide Web, Berners Lee is quite clear. "If you don't have the right to freely refer to somebody's work then it's a serious problem." He believes that the wider issue of online copyright must be addressed.
"For the Web to work efficiently computers have got to make copies of documents whenever they need to. The concept of copying as a unit of intellectual property doesn't work any more. The basic fundamental principle that `when you go to a lot of effort creating something and I get a lot of pleasure out of it I should pay you,' we keep - we Just have to stop worrying about how many disks it's been on in between.