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Robert Cailliau Talks With WikiNews

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the looking-backward-to-move-forward dept.

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.'"

2 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. damn, i miss BBS and Fidonet by randuev · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I miss those times... Bulletin Board software, messages from strangers, file areas, +++ATH0, first multiplayer games...
    ps. i wonder how fast would WWW catch on if it was invented today. threat of national security? ;)

  2. SVG didn't make it? by saforrest · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes, clearly the fact that SVG wasn't used in the manner foreseen indicates it has failed utterly.

    I never randomly stumble upon SVGs while browsing the web. Yes, never.