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Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, (TimBL or TBL) (b. June 8, 1955) is the inventor of the World Wide Web and head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees its continued development.

The first website Berners-Lee built (and therefore the first web site) was at (Extern link: http://info.cern.ch/ (which has been archived ((Extern link: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103- hypertext /hypertext/WWW/News/9201.html)) and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser, how to set up a web server, and so on. It was also the world's first web directory, since Berners-Lee later maintained a list of other web sites apart from his own.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Internet.

Many of the World Wide Web Consortium's achievements are able to be seen in many websites on the Internet. In 1996, in conjunction with Håkon Wium Lie, the W3C announced a standard entitled Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It was not until 2000 and 2001 that popular browsers began to support this standard, which shows Berners-Lee's first goal to maintain the freedom of the Web.

n Berners-Lee's book Weaving the Web, several recurring themes are apparent:

*It is just as important to be able to edit the web as browse it. (Wiki is a step in this direction, although Berners-Lee considers it merely a shadow of the WYSIWYG functionality of his first browser .)
*Computers can be used for background tasks that enable humans to work better in groups.
*Every aspect of the Internet should function as a web, rather than a hierarchy. Notable current exceptions are the Domain Name System and the domain naming rules managed by ICANN.
*Computer scientists have a moral responsibility as well as a technical responsibility.

In December 2004 he accepted a chair (professorship) in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK. He will be working closely with the University on the Semantic Web - his new project.

The text above is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL).
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tim Berners-Lee".