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.'"

Comments

A plague!

[aarku]

Woe onto the editor who posts a story with the word "blogosphere" in the headline.

Re:A plague!

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Woe onto the editor who posts a story with the word "blogosphere" in the headline.

I've never been fond of the word "blog" myself. It sounds to me like something you do when you have a stomach flu...

I for one

[TubeSteak]

I for one, welcome our new Blogging Lord

In related news

[Demona]

Tim Berners-Lee disables blog comments.

Yeah, But....

[CWRUisTakingMyMoney]

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? 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. Wikis are very popular, but so is their vandalism. Heck, Slashdot just did a story about that today with Wikipedia.

Re:Yeah, But....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yeah, But....

[m00nun1t]

You clearly missed the bit in the abstract that said:

"...if one had access rights..."

Blog runs Drupal

[Dreadlord]

Interestingly, Tim Berners-Lee uses Drupal to run his blog.

Re:Blog runs Drupal

[chx1975]

Err what? Drupal was written by Dries Buytaert and much later, DeanSpace was using Drupal. http://drupal.org/node/769 and for eg. http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/view/252

Thus MySpace?

[Eberlin]

At a public library computer lab, the most common use of the machines is people gawking at other people's pictures on myspace. At any given time, this is about 70 percent of the usage.

Though I'm definitely thankful for this wonderful thing that Sir Tim envisioned, there's a part of me that suffers a bit. For every tool created, there are good uses and bad uses, and yeah I know I'm probably not fit to decide which category myspace belongs in...but I bet that what we most commonly use the web for nowadays is not what even Sir Tim had in mind.

Re:Thus MySpace?

[Neoprofin]

Truly the creativity he invisioned has been wasted on finding new and bizarre fetish porn or downloading the new 50 cent album? That's the tragedy of life I guess.

While that may be the case one cannot dispute the postive impact that the WWW has had on exposing people to others viewpoints and giving even the most awkward of fringe views a home to be expressed.

Re:Thus MySpace?

[Malangali]

At a public library computer lab, the most common use of the machines is people gawking at other people's pictures on myspace. At any given time, this is about 70 percent of the usage.

Henry Ford probably never envisioned Hummers driving over curbs to get to the best parking spaces at the mall.

The Wright brothers probably never envisioned people flying massive airplanes into buildings as weapons.

The inventors of the television probably never envisioned "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire."

Thomas Edison, when he invented the phonograph, most certainly did not imagine gangsta rap.

Inventions happen, but what happens when they are released into the wild is not in the hands of the inventor. And really, why should it matter what the inventor was thinking of when s/he first developed the innovation?

Re:Thus MySpace?

[Eberlin]

The point is that for every innovation presented to the masses, there is a commercialization, and inevitably, a complete bastardization of the original concept. Even you point this out.

It is more a statement against human nature than it is about the vision of one man.

Re:Thus MySpace?

[osu-neko]

Actually, the most telling statement about human nature here is how, when someone uses a new tool in a way someone else doesn't like, it's called "bastardization". That it happens isn't a statement against human nature, but that it's viewed that way by some certainly is...

Re:Thus MySpace?

[gad_zuki!]

>but I bet that what we most commonly use the web for nowadays is not what even Sir Tim had in mind.

So? Linus probably never thought he'd be writing code for missile trajectory systems. Edison would be completely and utterly confused by 21st century life, culture, and technology.

As far as myspace goes, to each his own. At the very least it has a positive social function in the exchange of ideas and networking, albeit for a certain demographic. Just because you aren't a teen anymore doesn't mean that suddenly all teens suck or that things were 'better' before.

If people are concerned about control, legacy, content filtering, etc then they should stay out of the open game. Go proprietary like Compuserv, Prodigy, and to a lesser extent AOL. Technology which decentralizes information like the internet or the printing press leads to many things. Hearing people complain about ordinary blogs, LJ, myspace, etc must have been just like hearing the Catholic church complain about how people are learning to read their own bibles or are publishing criticism of government and the church. Some things never change it seems.

Re:Editing pages?

[Bogtha]

Why are they hacks? GET is for retrieving a resource from the server, PUT is for putting a resource on the server, and POST is for sending information to a resource on the server. In what way are they not "proper"?

Re:Editing pages?

[mill]

In what way are GET and PUT horrible hacks?

Oh great another blog "news" story geez

[SmallFurryCreature]

What do I care who this "Berners-Lee" guy is anyway. Another useless nobody, why I bet that if I travel back in time and shoot him it will have absolutly no eff

This story is technically incorrect

[pHatidic]

The first ever webpage, Tim's homepage, was a blog.

Re:OMG

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, jokes get sick of YOU!

HTML WYSIWYG editing?

[TeknoHog]

From TFA:

Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor.

I thought the idea of WYSIWYG goes completely against HTML's separation of content from presentation. I can't imagine why TBL would say something like this, perhaps his meaning of WYSIWYG is different from mine?

Re:HTML WYSIWYG editing?

[SandHawk]

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).

Re:HTML WYSIWYG editing?

[Bogtha]

Content is separate from presentation today (or should be), but it wasn't always so - CSS and stuff is a (relatively) new idea.

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:

The LINK element is typically used to indicate authorship, related indexes and glossaries, older or more recent versions, document hierarchy, associated resources such as style sheets, etc.

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.

There was no *need* to separate content from presentation then

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:

A philosophical rule was that HTML should convey the structure of a hypertext document, but not details of its presentation.

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.

So...

[bunnyman]

Dropping the term "blogosphere" for a moment, we can see that the inventor of the World Wide Web has a blog, a "web log" if you will.

So the headline should be:

Inventor of WWW Uses His Own Invention

Re:So...

[thesnarky1]

Wait... I didn't see anything in TFA about Al Gore....

Re:Editing pages?

[heinousjay]

More properly, there are some horrible hacks out there who misuse HTTP. In particular, anyone who uses the GET method to change server state should have a finger removed.

Browsers, on the other hand, have implemented some horrible hacks in lieu of properly implementing the protocol. That's more along the lines of your complaint.

"A PERSONAL NOTEBOOK" --TimBL, 1990

[s388]

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.

Blogosphere

[tero]

Anyone using the word "Blogosphere" should be executed publicly.