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Tim Berners-Lee Enters Blogosphere
Saiyine writes "Sir Timothy 'Tim' John Berners-Lee has entered the world of blogging. From his first post: 'In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights ... Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space.'"
Interestingly, Tim Berners-Lee uses Drupal to run his blog.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
According to this,
"It would browse http: space and news: and ftp: spaces and local file: space, but edit only in file: space"
so i'm guessing editing on the host machine only?
Try this: http://www.webdav.org/.
Did Tim have the whole world in mind back in 1989, or was he just trying to create a network for scientists and researchers such as himself?
The first HTML browser he wrote was called 'WorldWideWeb'. You figure it out.
Surely, he couldn't have overlooked the ease of vandalism on the system he envisioned, but a community of scientists is much less likely to vandalize each other's work than the population at large.
I don't think he envisioned anonymous collaborative editing.
Yes, what Tim means by WYSIWYG (I'm pretty sure) is immersive editing, a direct manipulation interface.
It's WYSIWYG if you think of the document in an abstract sense, separated from all style (or in your own style -- knowing that others will see it in their style).
That's not really accurate. It's true that HTML 3.2 included a hell of a lot of presentational markup, but that was because the W3C decided to publish a specification based on what everybody was doing (i.e. browser extensions) rather than what should be done.
If you turn the clock back further, you'll find that older HTML specifications didn't concern themselves with presentation much at all, and were designed to allow varying styles, including stylesheets. For example, read the HTML 2.0 specification, and you'll see that provision is explicitly made for stylesheets. Yes, you can use CSS with an HTML 2 document, even though CSS hadn't been developed by the time HTML 2.0 was published. I quote:
CSS is far from the first stylesheet language, there have been others, such as DSSSL. It's a shame browser vendors didn't implement stylesheets much sooner, but the fault lies with them, not with HTML, as you can see.
You are only really thinking about "presentation" in terms of the exact styling given to particular element types in a high-res graphical environment. Presentation is a wider topic than that. Separating content from presentation was just as necessary back then - otherwise you'd have content written on a terminal that can fit 100 characters in a row screwing up on terminals that can only fit 80 characters in a row, and so on. Tim Berners-Lee had this to say on the matter, in his book about the origins of the WWW, Weaving the Web:
As far as Tim using the term 'WYSIWYG', I think he's misusing the term as a synonym for 'graphical editor' as many people do, rather than having any deeper meaning.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
A good example of misuse is those links sent after you register with a site, for you to click on and validate your account.
The idea of GET is that you can prefetch it and it should be cacheable and not change anything on the server. It should be ok for an email client to cache any links without breaking anything.
They should bring up an page with a form with a "validate this account" button that HTTP POSTs and makes a change.
You clearly missed the bit in the abstract that said:
"...if one had access rights..."
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Here's Tim's brief list of his envisioned uses of the web, from 1990:
Here are some of the many areas in which hypertext is used. Each area has its specific requirements in the way of features required.
* General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc.
* Completely centralized publishing - online help, documentation, tutorial etc
* More or less centralized dissemination of news which has a limited life
* Collaborative authoring
* Collaborative design of something other than the hypertext itself
* Personal notebook
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Uses.html
The guy isn't an idiot. Apparently you haven't noticed that. He helped devise something that would have myriad uses, essentially limited only by the needs and imaginations of its users.
It's a MEDIUM.
For SHARING INFORMATION. And BEING CREATIVE. With MEANS for MOST ANYBODY to contribute and participate. And despite what you may tend to think, personal and interpersonal details (even on the level of gossip or the ravings of a hyper teenybopper) in fact qualify as information.
Care to explain how people using myspace makes you suffer? Maybe if they were wasting a limited resource like computer stations or bandwidth which you or someone else needed for a more urgent or immediate purpose, but it seems like you're simply ideologically opposed to people doing whatever they want.
Even today the web serves the same purposes that the guy laid out in 1990, just in much more fanciful ways, and more importantly on a web itself that is infinitely richer and wider.
Philo Farnsworth was once asked on What's My Line if he had invented some kind of a machine that might be painful when used. He answered "yes, sometimes it's most painful," because he had invented the television.