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

SVG did not make it?

[Max Romantschuk]

I beg to differ. Maybe if failing is the same as "Not ubiquitous on the web", but I find myself using SVG more and more. My vector work in Inkscape is saved in SVG. I've created dynamically generated SVG and rendered it to static images using Batik, to automatically generate hundreds of heading images for websites. Firefox now supports basic SVG. I wouldn't call it a failure as much as slow adoption...

Re:SVG did not make it?

[Spad]

Until all the major browsers ship with SVG support built in and enabled by default, SVG will not be a "success". It will instead be relegated to VRML territory - useful but rarely used outside of certain communities.

Re:SVG did not make it?

[nyctopterus]

I think SVG will make it, eventually, but it lost out to flash in a big way.

The reason, I think, was editors. If you make something in Flash (the editor) it will play in the flash plugin (version permitting of course). But on the SVG side, you had a bunch of things which could export to SVG, but would let you do a bunch of stuff that couldn't be exported. Drawing something for SVG has always been a hit and miss affair -- because it's been so easy to add things that aren't supported by SVG. Having to think to yourself while drawing "will this work in SVG?" is not an option. If I could have flipped Illustrator into "SVG mode", which turned off the things that would make it incompatible with SVG specs, that might have done it.

Inkscape's really nice, and certainly a big step in the right direction, but it needs a lot of work. The interface is okay, but pros will want floating palettes for everything (including colour, gradients, the whole bit), and the lack of a native OS X version is quite crippling in the design world.

Re:SVG did not make it?

[iamdrscience]

I like SVG, but I really don't see why so many people have been taking issue with this guy's statement that it has been a failure. First of all, it's pretty clear that he was talking about SVG failing as a web graphics format and in this regard I think he's completely right, I can't think of any page I've ever seen that embedded SVG images in them other than SVG example sites. It doesn't even seem to be gaining much steam now that more browsers support it, Firefox and Opera support natively and although IE doesn't, Adobe includes an SVG plug-in for IE with installations of Acrobat Reader (or at least they did, I haven't checked lately). The only time I regularly run into SVGs on the web is on sites like Wikipedia or sometimes F/OSS project sites, but even there, they're never embedded in the page, they're have a rasterized version of the SVG and then link to the SVG file as a "source" for it.

Outside of the web, I agree, it would be unfair to call SVG a failure, but that said, it hasn't been a runaway success either. SVG has been successful enough that people use it and it's generally well supported by most vector drawing applications, but most people don't work using SVGs, they use whatever format is native to their application (Inkscape users being an obvious exception because its native format effectively is SVG). Also, while SVG has gained acceptance as a platform/application agnostic way to send vector artwork to other people, it's still less popular than other formats like EPS (or even PDFs nowadays).

Re:SVG did not make it?

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

[SVG] doesn't even seem to be gaining much steam now that more browsers support it, Firefox and Opera support natively and although IE doesn't, Adobe includes an SVG plug-in for IE with installations of Acrobat Reader (or at least they did, I haven't checked lately).

Adobe has announced they will drop support for the plug-in on January 1st 2008. And I suspect that by then, Firefox still won't provide any controls to pan or zoom embedded SVG images (which leaves it useless for large diagrams, maps, etc.)

Re:SVG did not make it?

[nyctopterus]

Sigh, this is such a problem with many open source projects - they get 95% there, and then say who needs that fancy nice shit on top, it basically works. If you want it, write it yourself! Well, newsflash: artists aren't programmers! I think that is why the open source creative apps have seen little success in comparison to system/server applications.

The big deal about X11 is that it's as slow as hell (Inkscape takes 3-5 minutes to boot on my system, what's that about?), the fonts look like shite (might not matter to programmer types, but it drives visual creatives nuts), the widgets are over-sized, the keyboard shortcuts are not mac standard, and the real biggy: the menus are not even in the OSX menu bar! Inkscape has SOME floating palettes, yes. But it needs floating palettes for colour, gradients and layers. It would also be nice if they didn't take up half the screen.

All this adds up to something that is pretty much unusable for most creative professionals or serious hobbyists working on Macs. Given the power under it hood (yes, I do use it sometimes), that's a crying shame.

If none that stuff bothers you, I can guarantee you've never worked on images/design professionally, nor even as a serious hobby. This stuff needs to be fixed, or Inkscape is heading to GIMPsville.

I now hate Tim Berners-Lee.

[iamdrscience]

On the technical side it was not always the best of understanding between me and the team. For example, I was convinced that we needed to build-in a programming language, but the developers, Tim first, were very much opposed. It had to remain completely declarative. Maybe, but the net result is that the programming-vacuum filled itself with the most horrible kluge in the history of computing: Javascript.

Amen.

I can't help but think how much further along web applications would be if there were a programming language built-in from the start.

Re:PDF is irrelevant to the web.

[TheRaven64]

Solaris still comes w/ Display PostScript as an option, and it worked quite even more nicely in NeXTstep, and Display Ghostscript was developed for use in GNUstep. DPS in Solaris is Sun's second attempt at using PostScript for GUIs, the first being NeWS. NeWS ran entire user interface widgets in the PostScript interpreter, which made it great for remote display: clicking on a button would give immediate feedback, as the view object was run on the client side, and asynchronously pass an event to the back-end.

One big reason for its failure was that it was hard to write UI components in one language and the rest of the code. It's a shame James Gosling didn't learn from this when he went on to write Java, which could have been NeWS-done-right if RMI had been used by default for communicating with view objects.

Gopher was not free - it failed

[Shirotae]

Gopher was around before WWW but to run a Gopher server you had to do some sort of deal with some US University or something of the kind. Where I worked, it was just too much effort to try to get our management to negotiate the necessary agreement to put up a Gopher server so after a few brief internal experiments we dumped Gopher. We could just download an run a web server on the same host that was serving FTP and provide more convenient access to the data that was already public.

If getting started on the web had involved asking the boss for money we would just not have done it. I have no idea how many other people were in a similar position, but for me having code that was free in both senses made all the difference.

I believe that if those who started it had set out to get rich from the web from the start it would have failed completely.