derek abdinor

Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, has a great way of putting internet terminology into focus, from his unique vantage point. I reproduce some concepts here for simplification:

The Net
aka: The Internet (http, nntp, ftp, email), International Information Infrastructure
Era: 1980s-1990s
Realisation:

It isn’t the cables, it is the computers which are interesting

The Web
aka: World Wide Web
Era: 1990s-2000s
Realisation:

It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting

The Social Graph
aka: Web 2.0, semantic web, now
Era: 2000s -
Realisation:

It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important” or “its not about the social networking sites, its about the social network itself

Tim has put things nicely into perspective. I especially agree with the last point: I don’t care about Facebook, but I like what Facebook has taught us thus far and wrote a little ditty about it.

He goes on to say “The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.”

Wasn’t HTML meant to move gracefully over to XHTML so that we had a seperation between:

• structure (html)
• design (css, images)
• layout (css, html)
• business logic (php, asp, visual n++)?

You know, death of the <font> tag parties and no more bgcolor, tables tables tables etc. Well, HTML is being revived as version 5 by the w3c. I’ve read some of the debates, but I haven’t got the exec summary, please share. Will love to know what will happen to web standards now <sigh></font></blink>

Update August 9:

First view of the new tags: Slashdot IBM

Went to the launch of this auspicious organisation and its Southern African presence at the Meraka Institute, CSIR on Monday 14 May. The W3C have been credited with “inventing” the internet (along with William Gibson, Al Gore and Bill Gates) but actually their Director is Tim Berners-Lee, of “inventing the World Wide Web” fame. Essentially they’re saw what the browser wars of 97-99 were doing and decided a standards body was necessary, sort of self-appointed marshals of the Wild West.

Bragging rights include the best CSS2 reference for much of the early 2000′s, starting RDF, arbitrating RSS-Atom, extending the extensible Markup Languages. Tim, feeling slightly underachiev-ish, having created the web, decided to make sense of this all and has begun the Semantic Web project. Look at this, as well as the Mobile Web Initiative which Meraka is also doing good work towards.

Incredible: PageRank indicates a 10/10 for W3c.org, first I’ve ever seen!!!