Slashdot Mirror
Tim Berners-Lee on the Web
notmyopinion writes "In a wide-ranging interview with the British Computer Society, Sir Tim Berners-Lee criticizes software patents, speaks out on US and ICANN control of the Internet, proposes browser security changes, and says he got domain names backwards in web addresses all those years ago."
It's about time he got on the web. I mean, it's like 15 years old. Everyone is on it these days.
I found this amusing, along the lines of "there are those who call me.... Tim."
Seriously though, I thought he had some great things to say about professionalism in IT. We all need to absorb and remember this:
"Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance?
I would have skipped on the double slash - there's no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order - in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http://uk.org.bcs/members. The last two terms of this example could both be servers if necessary."
He could do anything differently and he would drop a slash?
.uk.org.bcs actually no ?
\u262D = \u5350
"Slashes should have been backwards as well, you tea-smoking Vance-Baggers."
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Sir Tim Berners-Lee ... says he got domain names backwards in web addresses all those years ago.
But how could you make an advertising jingle out of
"com dot expediAAAAAAHHH!"
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Be nice; he invented the medium you're using to flame him... ;)
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
"I don't think we've gained anything from the .biz or .info domains - only that a few companies have benefited financially"
.nets, only charities .orgs, etc etc.
at least someone realises this.
If i had my way i'd redo the whole domain system; the distinctions between TLDs are totally irrelevent these days.
That or enforce the distinctions, so that only ISPs can have
The article mentions that an internet year is 2.6 months but at the bottom it says that an internet year is 2.6 times shorter than a regular year. Which is the correct figure? I want to calculate my age in internet years.
Unlike some people, Sir Tim Berners-Lee actually achieved something (you know that thing they call the World Wide Web) that paved the way for him to be knighted by the Queen. Think of that the next time someone says "Yes, sir" to a manager.
So the idea that he started off having trouble with the Berkeley naming convention doesn't surprise me at all.
(I'd prefer a more heirarchical system, myself, where an organization can ONLY have one domain name and have all their actual addresses inside of that. It would make the namespace a lot less cluttered and would reduce trademark abuses. On the other hand, names would be a lot longer. However, if you're using a search engine, a portal or bookmarks most of the time anyway, that's no big deal.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Be nice; he invented the medium you're using to flame him... ;)
Doesn't make Henry Ford a good driver...
You'll have that sometimes...
Yes me lord. *voice of peon in WarCraft*
Life is not for the lazy.
Actually, henry ford invented the production line - automobiles already existed. I'd imagine he was pretty good at managing production lines.
""I don't think we've gained anything from the .biz or .info domains - only that a few companies have benefited financially"
.nets, only charities .orgs, etc etc."
.NET rule of "internet infrastructural addresses only". It was impossible. Poeple who wanted to cheat the system always found ways and the harder NSI made it the more difficult it was for legitimate users to get .NET addresses.
.COM was "i-my-e-companynicheproduct.com"?
at least someone realises this.
If i had my way i'd redo the whole domain system; the distinctions between TLDs are totally irrelevent these days.
That or enforce the distinctions, so that only ISPs can have
The purpose of a domain name is to make it easy for poeple. Computers don't care, they use IP addresses and the DNS is simpy a way to make easy to rememeber names that are automatically converted to IP addresses by software.
There is no taxonomy or more correctly, ontology, behind domain names. They're arbitrary strings of characters. There is no meaning whatsoever in the TLD, that's sad articfact of the way things were; they should not ideally have any meaning.
NSI under the original Internic cooperative agreement tried for many years to enforce the
TLDS should be meaningful, but arbitrary. And pretending any sort of classification system can me made out of it belies two decades of expereince with the way we name computers on the network.
Sir Tim may be a Sir but he's dead wrong about this expansion of tld space. Would you find it easier to remember (and yes, there are times you'll rememeber and type in, instead of looking something up in a search engine) company.biz or perhaps company.info because that was available when perhapes the only thing available in
Typically the internet solves problems of scarcity (.com names) by creating new resources, not by regulating old ones.
Need Mercedes parts ?
"Who invented this thing?"
It's the ".myspace.com" TLD.
The symantic web, as discussed, must rely on classification. To my knowledge, there is no standard for classification of information to fit data into that symantic web. Does anyone know how that is supposed to work? To my knowledge, such attempts fall over when trying to classify even the simplest of things, such as chairs. The types, descriptions, and formats of chairs and information about chairs outweighs any attempt to share that information across the entire Internet. A chair in the middle of China can be totally different from most or all of the chairs from any given store in the western world. The fan-out or spread of information for any given key word or identifier is so huge that it becomes impossible to manage, and even in the symantic web, a search for chair returns about the same as a google search does now.
What am I missing?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Actually, thatd be a peasant. Peons say "Zug zug"
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Best comment in the interview:
"Most browsers have certificates set up and secure connections, but the browser view only shows a padlock - it doesn't tell you who owns the certificate."
I still can't believe that, to this very day, there is no major browser that displays the right information about a certificate by default! This is the whole point of a certificate: it tells you that paypal.com actually belongs to a real-world entity named "PayPal Inc."
At the very least, when connected via SSL to a site with a valid cert, the browser address bar should have an extra line that names the real-world entity. A yellow padlock and location bar tell you nothing about who you're really talking to. You shouldn't have to manually examine the certificate to find out this information.
Does anyone have any idea why even Firefox, with all its other great usability and security innovations, still gets this basic thing wrong??
Where are my (freshly expired) mod points!!!... ;-)
Paul B.
...there aren't many people in modern day Britain that can be said about, so we tend to make a big thing out of those few who do achieve anything at all. :\
Doesn't make Henry Ford a good driver...
Maybe not, but he was a damn fine passenger.
Please, please, please will someone finally shoot the semantic web and put it out of its dwindling, painful misery.
Surely enough is enough?
Of course Henry Ford didn't invent the production line, jackass.
DNS often sucks because the databases are too big, too flat and powered by too small a system. Flat naming systems are evil and inefficient.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That would just be so black and yellow and give everyone a warm fuzzy feeling. Only the feeling you get from, you know, knowing you're protected by Symantec and all ...
startkeylogger
Tell me about it.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Ok, I agree with his wishing he could nuke the slashes, they serve no real purpose. But sorry, he didn't invent DNS so he never had the choice of how to specify the hostname portion of a URL. Any attempt to use anything other than a DNS hostname would have resulted in his invention either being fixed or discarded by the Internet community.
Imagine the chaos! http://com.gmail.com/ for access to your username@gmail.com account? Put ftp://com.bigrepository.ftp into a web browser or ftp.bigrepository.com in a standalone ftp (or command line based) client? What a load of crap.
Democrat delenda est
get rid of the dot notation entirely if you're not going to admit you just used the domain naming system that pre-existed the web
if the server name isn't going to be the name of a server, then you can do this:
http://uk/org/bcs/members
and now everything is a hierarchical pathname that is resolved to a fqdn internally and nobody needs to worry that bcs.org.uk is a node on the network and members is a service on that node...
add it to the pile of big-woops! ideas along with ken thompson's anally elided 'e' in "creat()"...
Nothing like saying you invented the automobile and now complaining nobody makes them like I intented.
This got me thinking how strange it is for the http address to be in the address bar, instead of something like what tinyweb does. Odd how Netscape or Microsoft didn't do something like that years ago.
He should have dropped both slashes, then this site could be called Colondot instead of Slashdot. Then, when a website went down due to referral traffic, the site will have been "colondotted" - which is funnier 'cause it sounds like the site has been sh!t on.
Anyone who has ever setup a DNS server knows that the domain naming scheme has been backwards! Glad to see someone owning up to the mixup back then! It makes sense to me to have domain names reversed: Today's URL (fake) http://electronics.walmart.com/ which goes from narrow to broad. I don't normally try to think in reverse! Better URL (fake) http://com.walmart.electronics/ lends to a better way to list a web address. broad to narrow, just like the way we think. type of website name of company/organization/network name of department/server inside the company/organization/network When you are working with DNS servers, you'll note that it's not .com - it's com.
You might want to mention how tinyweb does it.
The following story is true, though extraordinarily sad.
At the company where I used to work, they registered all TLDs for their name. We had .com, .net, .org, .biz, etc.
One day, our chief marketing goober decided that .biz was going to be the next "in" thing on the Internet, and we would be one of the first companies to capitalize on it. So we had all of our business cards chaged, our mailers, our letterhead... everything. We were explicitly told never to use the .com domain name in our business dealings, it was .biz. We, the IT gurus, begged and implored them not to do this, that it would cause more trouble in the end than it was worth, and that the only companies that use .biz are fly-by-night companies that grab the .biz equivalent of famous .com names so that they can rip people off.
Who do you think they listened to?
Long story short: Within a few months, after our customers, suppliers, vendors, and lots of other really, really important people started complaining that their e-mails to us were bouncing back and e-mails from us were not being received because spam blockers were automatically assuming that our .biz address either weren't valid, our chief marketing goober decided to "spend more time with his family," our old business cards, letterhead, etc. was dug out, and we were instructed never to use the .biz domain name again.
I own all trademarks to the name 000.000.000.000, 255.255.255.255, 123.123.123.132, and 136.019.294.102.
AFAIK Henry Ford applied the already existing idea of the production line to the already existing idea of the automobile, but he was among the first to do so (not even *the* first). To his credit, he did, apparently, fine tune his automobile production line.
The interesting thing is how many of us assume that he invented either idea. Not that I blame you, I also walked around with this impression for years until I actually looked it up. I just wonder about the source of these communal impressions and assumptions.
I do remember that, depending on the source, the inventor of the first automobile was either German, British or French -- it seems to come down to how you define the first modern internal combustion engine.
Mass production seems just as foggy, but I read one source that credited a French musket maker with the idea of interchangeable parts -- sort of the father of mass production (he did predate Eli Whitney with this idea however, whom I've also read as credited with mass production).
What let me get this straight, people really say "Yes, sir" to a manager? ...
... Oh! You get the point.
I always just tell him if its so important to fix the "damn server then do it you fucking self!", then I mutter "lazy shit" while he stalks away. Can't he see that I was obviously in AQ pwning some n00b AI boss? I mean, honestly, what do they think the're paying me for? To actually do work? Isn't that what those inbians, no idias
Stopping Content Restriction Annulment and Protection means not calling it DRM.
Opera already does exactly what you describe!
They would have been "Comdots" instead!
This space available.
blbl-omlh dllll....s-s-s--si-si-si.Sir TIMMAYY!
now kill yourself.
Well, he was given that title. it's not like he just woke up one day and said "Ya know, I'm pretty cool. I'm going to start calling myself Sir Tim!"
Well you are right, you need to know the identity of one signer of the encryption keys to be able to verify that it is the correct key. I think there are things called key-signing parties(events) for that purpose.
But the parent is somewhat right too, because actually you would first have to make sure that you have correctly established the identity of the root key-signing enitity over a secure handshake, which often is not the case.
On the other hand, with an extended web of trust, man in the middle attacks become somewhat hypothetical, it is more likely you would be tricked into using bad keys instead.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
In this country, domain names always used to be big-endian {starting with the country}. For instance, uk.ac.aston.vax. E-mail addresses on our VAX system were written something like "CBS%UK.AC.ASTON.VAX::AJS" but I think that was a feature of the way VAX/VMS handled e-mail deliveries to other machines; other, UNIX systems used to use things like "ajs@uk.ac.aston.vax".
Both ways make sense, for different reasons. {And it's worth remembering that, on the Continent, it's common to write the street name before the house number in a physical address [e.g. Weteringschans 17]; though this is spoilt somewhat by the street invariably preceding the town.} It's the same with number representations. Little-endian gives you the units first, which is how you want to do addition and subtraction; but big-endian makes it easier to do rough comparisons and rounding.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Or why not http://org/slashdot ?
Consistent both on significance, specifics and delimiter - even when moving over to the part that today is known as the "path". Actually, I think this would be well worth investigatig further, perhaps by experimenting with extensions to browsers for a while and see how it would work. They would have to cheat by doing multiple DNS lookups though, as it is more unclear what is the address - in the future, DNS lookups would handle this by getting the whole URL and use the longest match. Like Sir Tim said, everyone of the parts of the path could be a server.
Of course the whole worlds URL parsing libraries would have to be rewritten, but per library that would be a very small task, and the parsing rules are actually easier.
That should of course be a single slash after http, as it would be a TBL-address.
It's been 10 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment (and counting). You'd think only two posts in a row with over 3 minutes between wouldn't be considered flooding. Retards.
Suppose you were looking for electronics to buy and you didn't really care were it came from, as long as it is cheap.
.com isn't really a hierarchy, anything can be in .com
Then http://electronics.walmart.com/ makes a lot more sense, because you see that you are where you are looking for.
Now:
http://com.walmart.electronics/
Most people don't really care whether it is com or org. It also doesn't play nice with autocompletion
Moreover,
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
God are you dumb or what?
http://com.gmail/ would give you access to your username@com.gmail. SMTP and FTP do predate HTTP, but a little parsing in mailservers would fix whatever crawled up you ass and started a fart fest.
Sheesh, and a card-carrying 4-digit UID. You should be ashamed.
The interesting thing is how many of us assume that he invented either idea. Not that I blame you, I also walked around with this impression for years until I actually looked it up. I just wonder about the source of these communal impressions and assumptions.
Ya know, I just had this discussion with someone. The person was basically trying to justify something an elementary school teacher said to the students that she knew was incorrect. I was really offended by the fact that a teacher knowingly misled her students, and it turned into this big argument. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case a lot - like in the case of the henry ford misconceptions, which we probably both learned from some teacher many years ago.
Why not no slash? http:org/slashdot. Much like mailto:foo@example.org (or would that be mailto:foo@org/example). Or aim:do_something_really_annoying, bittorrent:linux.iso.torrent, irc:freenode.org/#debian.
The good thing about going from least specific to most specific is that it's easy to chop off unnecessary data. In dates for example, "the 25th of March, 2006" is a mouthful to say. But saying just "the 25th" is sufficient because one can assume the month is March. Or if not, "the 25th of March" is enough for an entire year. You can keep adding more information as needed.
That wouldn't seem to work very well with on the web though... you could type "some_unique_webpage" and be taken there immediately. Or you could type "some_non-unique_webpage/slashdot" which would take you to slashdot's version of that page. Or "very_non-unique_webpage/joesblog/org" for a complete specification. I wonder if that would work well or be horribly awful if you integrated a search engine with DNS... there would need to be a different separator between the DNS stuff and the webpage (although some cleverness could probably guess most of the time) "pic_001/niagra_falls/picture:joesblog.org".
Since there are so many websites, this probably wouldn't save much typing in practice... The browser could perhaps limit its domain to sites often visited, unless explicitly taken to a new site or an explicit search requested. If you typed in something unique, it could take you there. Something non-unique, and it would show a list of more specific choices. In both cases, there would be a search button to expand the domain to the entire web (or maybe specific subsections of the web much like google.com/linux etc.).
And of course, this doesn't map directly onto a filesystem.
And the freaky part is that it would have sounded perfectly normal to us.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
it's .co.uk not .com.uk, but yeah. good comment.
A bit of TBL fun ... "Was it not Tim Berners-Lee who said..."
Reversing the domain name would be cool. http://org.w3.www/People/Berners-Lee
//org/w3/www/http/People/Berners-Lee
//org/w3/http/People/Berners-Lee
//org/w3/web/People/Berners-Lee
w 3/ftp/pub/doc/README.txt
o w about reversing the DNS part of a non-URL email address? timbl@org.w3
Sticking to only dots or slashes would be cool (though it is nice to distinguish when the URL is switching from DNS naming to something else). http://org/w3/www/People/Berners-Lee
But the protocol is now unacceptibly out of order. We need to move it to its proper place in the heirarchy:
There we go! Finally, switching between http & https won't seem like switching universes to the browsers anymore.
Of course, the "www" & "http" are redundant. A good DNS admin should not have an A record for "www" but a CNAME record. The "www" node name should only be used for http & https. (This is more of a "best practices" thing than a URL change.)
Even though people should avoid dealing with raw URLs as much as possible, it'd still be nice to keep ugliness like "www" or "http" out of them. (Again, really a best practices thing.)
The double-slash...it serves a purpose. It announces that this URL follows the normal "path" conventions. This is nice when you're writing generic code to munge URLs. I suppose ":/" could do that just as easily as "://". Our new URL scheme, though, is so different at this point...
/org/w3/web/People/Berners-Lee
/org/
/org/w3/mail/timbl
H
But then the username is out of order: org.w3@timbl
But then, what if your username is your full name? org.w3@tim.berners-lee
Now your name is out of order--unless you're asian. I guess we'll have to mandate that usernames always be surname first.
Or--maybe--we could recognize that these unified namespaces are combinations of individual namespaces & that each individual namespace follows rules that make sense for it & that it is madness to try to get all these disparate namespaces to follow a single set of rules. Maybe.
is that dns names use one order whilst file paths use another.
HTTP urls are essentially formatted as a file path with a dns name as one component so the top level name ends up somewhere in the middle and if the hostname is long potentially quite hard to spot.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It sounds like you spent time in Massachusetts (based on the the word rotary, the cities you chose.)
Each state has its own convention for road signs and traffic systems (loosely based on federal standards.) Some states are downright awful (Massachusetts, New Jersey) and other states are really good. (My Ohio for instance goes out of its way to make road signage detailed and clear.)
Depends where you go.
If you go with slashes instead of dots then the path could drill down to individual directories..
... (for the nationalistic ) ... (for the NewWorldOrderOneWorldGovmnt) ... /entity/subenitty/directory/subdirectory/file
d ex.html
(p.s. please ignore that slashdot finds links for these
examples)
http://co/tld
http://tld/co
for example, calcula might be found at:
http://us/org/pentamino/home/pentalive/calcula/in
(and as it is currently "/index.html" is the default and might be omitted)
yea still ...
it's Sir Jack Ass to you.
This makes it a major pain when you just want to encrypt data without claiming to be anyone in particular, since you have to jump through a lot of hoops both on server and client side to get it working. The browser gets bitchy about a certificate that isn't signed by any of its roots, even though it may very well be the case that nobody cares.
right so you've got yourself a nice encrypted connection to the man in the middle. You need some mechanism to tell you that the person you think you are linked with is the person you are really linked with or the encryption isn't a whole lot of help.
theres the web of trust system but that has problems of its own (e.g. that you have to trust people between you and the target who don't have any legal contracts to uphold and could well be corrupted).
also i'm not sure why the padlock icon is insufficiant, it means that provided the root CAs are doing thier job properly and there aren't nasty browser issues (e.g. the long username url trick) the site i'm talking too really is the legitimate owner of paypal.com. Do i really need to know any more than that?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
> http://com.gmail/ would give you access to your username@com.gmail.
.com on urls must be in muscle memory or something. Bleh. But the point still stands that he didn't invent DNS, it was a longstanding established RFC based standard so any attempt to redefine how hosts are named when he published his first draft of the WWW would have been laughed out of town. So it wasn't his decision to make. And while I'm posting again, the history revisionism doesn't stop there, now he claims html wasn't really an instance of sgml and that his 'pure' vision could have escaped the politics of the day we would already be living in xml nirvana. Bullcrap, anyone who has ever looked at sgml can see html is an instance. Plus it was the simplicity of html that allowed it to become established, had a load of xml crap been foisted on us nobody would have known what to do with it back then. Remember that good xml processing tools are only now becoming widespread.
:)
Yea, typo on that one, adding
The guy has obviously been reading his own press about how he "invented" the web + the press notion that "WWW == Internet" and has begun believing it. What piffle, we all know Al Gore "invented" the Internet.
Democrat delenda est
The old UK Academic network (Called JANET) used reverse nameing order.
I think they changed it to conventional DNS ordering when it got upgraded (Super JANET).
I am a bit hazy on the details (As for some reason, do most facts about my collage years in general)
This was before web browsers really took off.
I do remember it being a total Pain in the ass trying to send email anywere outside of UK academia though, you had to use special mail relays that did message translation, occasionally, very badly, and as for Attachments? forget it.
Anyway the point being, its a waste of time adding arbitary standards when there is already a defined standard unless they add something really useful. And this doesnt.
I feel a certain amount of guilt over this. I believe it was in 1968 that I presented the full two-way Xanadu design to a university group, and they dismissed it as "raving"; whereupon I dumbed it down to one-way links and only one visible window. When they asked how the user would navigate, I suggested a backtrackable stack of recently visited addresses. I believe that this dumb-down, through the various pathways of projects imitating one another, became today's general design, and I am truly sorry for my role in it. - Ted Nelson
This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, "the connections each [document] has with all other [documents] - Paul Otlet
The seductive, destructive appeal of "ease of use." - A second powerful, systematic bias that leads computing technology development away from grappling with serious issues of collaboration - Doug Engelbart
Name, street address, city, state, country.
Nothing backward, illogical or out of order with that. DNS is simply following a well established convention.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There is even a Firefox extension.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I suggest you read this
http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/url-spec.txt
and look at who wrote/edited it. The committee could have defined URL's in pretty much any way he wished. As long as they provided a mechanism to map the authority of the URL to DNS there would have been no problem.
Big and little endian host/domain names are trivial to convert between.
The question that was asked was what he would do differently given the chance; ie. if he had been in chare of DNS. I'm sure TBL is quite aware that reuse of standards is a good thing.
I find 2006-03-26 to be most useful
Good, because it's ISO8601, a great universal worldwide standard. Get all the blogs, bulletin boards, web pages, etc. you use to standardize on it, so many of them are still stupidly trying to localize a WorldWide-Web with "26/3", "03-26-06" or other abominations.
=S