Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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. I now hate Tim Berners-Lee. by iamdrscience · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  2. Re:SVG did not make it? by iamdrscience · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).