Internet luminaries gathered in Boston on Wednesday to
celebrate the 10th anniversary of the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C), honour its founder, director and the web's inventor Tim
Berners-Lee.
Speakers at the gathering recounted, in sometimes excruciating
detail, the events leading to the creation of the web and the W3C,
which has promoted a long line of key web standards, including HTML
and XML.
Experts, including representatives of leading technology firms,
also looked forward to future developments backed by the W3C,
including the Semantic Web, which will allow users to access and
connect more types and sources of data online.
Early backers of the web were on hand to recount the early days
of the internet, which Berners-Lee invented in 1989 while working
at Cern, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, as a way to
manage and connect research information stored on different
machines.
In presentations, some funny, some flat, speakers described the
early days, when Berners-Lee and others jetted between France, the
UK and the US in a dizzying series of conferences and meetings to
evangelise the web and drum up support for a group to steward its
development.
Among the early challenges faced by web supporters was getting
Cern, in 1993, to relinquish intellectual property claims to HTML
and other technology invented at the lab that was integral to
spreading the web in the world at large, according to
Berners-Lee.
Other speakers recounted early squabbles, as the web grew and
the W3C's rising membership sought ways to contribute to the
standards development process.
Håkon Wium Lie, inventor of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
standard for formatting content on web pages, and now chief
technology officer at browser maker Opera, contributed an amusing
video recounting the early and humble days of the web, depicting it
as an afterthought created in the windowless, cramped subterranean
offices of Cern.
Alan Kotok, formerly of Digital Equipment, spoke of Cern's
dawning awareness of the potential of the web and his early role as
a backer of the W3C.
Other speakers addressed the enormous impact that the web has
had, in just over a decade, on the way that individuals live and
work.
"Internet use is now the norm, and that's just an amazing
adoption story," said Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American
Life Project. "The internet and the web have built themselves into
the very rhythms of people's lives."
From the time the first popular web browser appeared, the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications' (NCSA) Mosaic, it
took just four years for 50 million people to begin using the
web.
That compares with much longer adoption periods for other
revolutionary technologies, such as the telephone, which took 38
years to be adopted by the same number of people, and television,
which took 13 years to reach the 50 million user threshold, he
said.
Technological developments based on W3C standards such as HTML
and HTTP were an important part of the success of the web, and
brought ease of use to computing environments that were
distributed, heterogenous and complex, according to Bill Ruh,
global practice director at Cisco Systems.
But Berners-Lee was the star of the gathering, and he used the
occasion to focus attention on W3C's ongoing work, including the
Semantic Web, a World Wide Web extension that greatly expands the
information types and relationships between information that can be
represented online.
The W3C is the key proponent of the Semantic Web and has
published a specification for RDF (Resource Description Framework),
a technology that allows structured and semi-structured data of all
kinds to be shared across different applications.
The Semantic Web might, for instance, be used to make links
between different sources of information and research on heart
attacks, linking up related but dissimilar terms such as "heart
attack" and the more technical "myocardial infarction" or "MI",
said Eric Miller, Semantic Web activity lead at the W3C.
Social networking service Friendster, which is built on RDF, is
an early Semantic Web application, allowing individuals to visually
represent complex social relationships using media such as text and
images, he said.
But in order for the Semantic Web and its cousins, like web
services, to take off, they need to be based on what Berners-Lee
called a "clean architecture" that is deployed in a standard way
across companies and organisations.
"Hopefully we can create a clean, neat architecture that lasts
for several decades, instead of needing to be flushed out and
refitted in ten years," he said.
But even with standards in place, no one can predict the
catalyst or series of catalysts that will produce "disruptive
change", Berners-Lee said.
"Look at Google. People did not foresee Google coming because
they did not think that [disc storage] would be that cheap, and
they did not predict that you could use an algorithm to analyse the
web matrix and spot clusters of information," he said.
Many people at the conference reflected on the successes of the
past 10 years and the promise of ongoing developments like the
Semantic Web.
"It is important to reflect on how far we have traveled, and
interesting to see how these basic standards have become so deeply
ingrained," said Francis Fuca, programme manager for standards at
Thomson Legal & Regulatory.
Thomson has been a W3C member since 1997 and is following the
evolution of the Semantic Web closely, as the company looks for
ways to bring together disparate collections of data in one place
for its customers, Fuca said.
The sure sign of the success of developments like the web and
the Semantic Web in the coming decades will be that people stop
talking about them, said James Bell, director of the industry
standards programme office at Hewlett-Packard.
"They'll be like electricity, where people stopped talking about
it and started talking about all the interesting new things that
you can plug into the wall," he said.
Paul Roberts writes for IDG News Service