Robert Cailliau Talks With WikiNews

David Gerard writes "Wikipedia's citizen journalism sister site, Wikinews, has a long and interesting interview with Robert Cailliau, who worked with Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web. 'I also remember a big resistance against PostScript, but what do we see now? PDF everywhere. Fortunately PDF is an open standard and it's fairly elegant, but it could have turned out much worse. SVG did not make it. Tim, who had a longer experience with the internet world, convinced me that the web could only survive if all the code was freely available for everyone who wanted to tinker with it. In 1992-1993 I then worked patiently for some 6 months with CERN's Legal Service to draft a document that put the source code into the public domain. This also implied working to convince the management, up to the Directors, of the need to do so. The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that gave the WWW technology to the world.'"

Comments

Re:SVG did not make it?

[morgan_greywolf]

Inkscape doesn't have floating palettes? That's news to me. And it doesn't have a Mac OS X version? Oh, you probably mean a package that doesn't require X. I don't see what the big deal is about supporting native Cocoa widgets anyway. It's not like packages like Photoshop and Illustrator haven't veered away from the system standard widgets for years anyway (those palettes are Adobe's proprietary widgets, not native Mac OS widgets). If it's really that big a deal, then why doesn't someone take the source and write a Cocoa version?