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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?
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
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...
""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 ?
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??
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()"...
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.