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<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7371660.stm>
Page last updated at 03:30 GMT, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 04:30 UK
Web in infancy, says Berners-Lee
By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website


Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee developed the web while working at Cern

The world wide web is "still in its infancy", the web's inventor Sir Tim 
Berners-Lee has told BBC News.

He was speaking ahead of the 15th anniversary of the day the web's code was 
put into the public domain by Cern, the lab
where the web was developed.

The future web will put "all the data in the world" at the fingertips of 
every user, Sir Tim said.

"The web has been a tremendous tool for people to do a lot of good even though you 
can find bad stuff out there."

Making the web free to use had a vital role in spreading its use worldwide.

There are now 165 million different websites around the world, according to 
internet research firm Netcraft.

Sir Tim said he was optimistic about the future of the web.

'Fantastic experience'

"The experience of the development of the web by so many people collaborating 
across the globe has just been a fantastic
experience," he said.

"The experience of international collaboration continues. Also the spirit 
that really we have only started to explore
the possibilities of [the web], that continues."

Sir Tim predicted that the web's ability to engender collaboration could one 
day see the web being used to help manage
the planet.
        
The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the web was 
going to be
Robert Cailliau, Cern

"What's exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems 
of review, new systems of governance.

"My hope is that those will produce... new ways of working together 
effectively and fairly which we can use globally to
manage ourselves as a planet."

The ubiquity of the web gives the impression that its success was inevitable 
but that was not always the case, said
Robert Cailliau, who worked alongside Sir Tim.

The decision by physics laboratory Cern to release the web code into the 
public domain was not a straightforward one, he
told BBC News.

Technical proposals

Mr Cailliau helped draw up one of the early technical proposals for the web 
and later helped convince the directors at
Cern to "give the web away".

"The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the web was 
going to be," he said.

"We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really 
big thing. And therefore Cern couldn't hold
on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away."

He said competing technologies, such as Gopher, which was developed at the 
University of Minnesota, were also offering a
method of using hyperlinks to connect documents across computers on the 
internet.

"If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with 
Gopher then it would not have expanded into
what it is now.

"We would have had some sort of market share alongside services like AOL and 
Compuserve, but we would not have flattened
the world."

SEE ALSO
How the web went world wide
03 Aug 06 |  Technology
Web inventor warns of 'dark' net
23 May 06 |  Technology
Web creator rejects net tracking
17 Mar 08 |  Technology
Fifteen years of the web
05 Aug 06 |  Technology
Questions and answers: Tim Berners-Lee
17 Mar 08 |  Technology

RELATED INTERNET LINKS
Cern puts web into public domain
World Wide Web Consortium
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