_______________ ____________________ > Tim: > > I enjoyed a couple of short conversations with you at the WWW'94 conference > last month. (Thus far, I have written one article about the conferece, for > CMP's Internet Business Report newsletter.) When I asked you if you had > time for me to interview you during the conference, you suggested it would > be better for us to do the interview by electronic mail. With your kind > permission, I would like to proceed with the interview now. > > This interview will appear in the August issue of Interview World magazine. > It will be printed in a simple Question and Answer format, so your words > will appear as you write them. > > Please compose your responses in a relaxed way. Ideally I'd like to make > this interview as spontaneous and free flowing as a face-to-face > conversation -- so please feel free to respond impulsively, ramble on, make > digressions, speak freely and "off the top of your head," give answers to > questions that I didn't ask but should have -- etc. This will make it more > fun and interesting for readers. Please don't be too terse in your > responses -- we can always reduce the number of words you give us. I will > make sure you are able to review any cuts before the interview is published. > > > Here are my questions: > > 1. Where were you born? Please tell me (very briefly) a little bit about > your life from birth to college age (where did you live, what experiences > may have shaped or influenced you?). That's the first time I've been asked to trace WWW history back that far! I was born in London, England. My parents met while developing the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially, and I grew up playing with 5 hole paper tape and building computers out of cardboard boxes. Could that have been an influence? Later on I studied physics as a kind of compromise between mathematics and engineering. As it turned out, it wasn't that compromise, but it was something special in its own right. Nevertheless, afterward I went straight into the IT industry where more things seemed to be happening. So I can't really call myself a physicist. But physicists spend a lot of time trying to relate macroscopic behaviour of systems to microscopic laws, and that is the essence of the design of scalable systems. So physics was probably an influence. > 2. What led to your conception of the WWW? I dabbled with a number of programs representing information in a brain-like way. Some of the earlier were too abstract and led to hopelessly undebuggable tangles. One more practical program was a hypertext notebook I made for my own personal use when I arrived at CERN. I found I needed it just to keep track of the -- how shall I say -- flexible? creative? -- way new parts of the system, people and modules were added on and connected together. > 3. What elements might be in your personal background, character, > interests, or experiences that helped you to conceive the WWW as a solution > to a problem you were facing? The project I'd worked on just before starting W3 was a real-time remote procedure call, so that gave me some networking background. Image Computer Systems did a lot of work with text processing and communications -- I was a director before coming to CERN. Elements of character?! Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true, and the tendency to miss lunch. The former two probably helped. I think they are called Attention Defficiency Disorder now. ;-) > 4. When you were developing WWW as a way to describe CERN, did you ever > imagine it would become truely a "world wide web"? It was designed to. I didn't know that it would. I wanted it because I needed it, both to disseminate > 5. How much time do you spend working on WWW now? (Do you have other > responsibilities and interests?) Sure do -- our 3 year old, Alice, just gained a brother (Ben) on on 15 June so I try to fit WWW into a working day. It's a tight squeeze. > 6. Do you have some favorite Web sites for browsing (what are they)? (Sigh) I wish I did, but I hardly spend any time browsing. Historically, I appreciate the people who were first and showed others how things could be -- Franz Hoesel's Vatican Library, of course, Steve Putz's map server, lots more. > 7. How has your work on WWW, and its enormous popularity, affected your > life? (After all, you have achieved a bit of fame among those who use the > Internet.) The main effect of the growth of the web is that I have had reluctantly to chose how to divide my time. There are so many fascinating things coming out of and going into the web and I would like to be able to follow them all. > 8. How do you feel about the fact that WWW promises to generate large > amounts of money for some persons -- other than you, its creator -- who have > the desire and ability to capitalize on it? If it's good people, people will want to buy it, and money is they way they vote on what they want. I believe that system is the best one we have, so if it's right, sure people are going to make money. People will make money building software, selling information, and more importantly ding all kinds of "real" business which happens to work much better beacsue the web is there to make their work easier. I certainly don't mind! My priority is to see it develop and evolve in a way which will hold us in good setad for a long future, rather than to cash in personally right now. Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietory variations on network protocols, then I may get mad. > 9. What do you think are among the WWW's greatest strengths? The spirit of openness, excitement and fun among the developers and supportres. And all the technical points, of course: mainly, its ability to evolve: the way the URIs can encompas new protocols, and the the HTTP protocol negotiates data formats, for example. > 10. What do you think are among the Web's greatest weakness? The principle worry expressed to me has been the lack of definition of standards, and dedication of one organization to back up the web, ensure its stable and evolving future. Hence our putting together the W3 organisation, with initial seed sites at CERN and MIT. > 11. What is the most (or one of the most) pressing issue now for the Web? Eleven of the most? :-) The W3 organisation will address the editing of standards (though not a standards body -- the IETF will be the standards body I hope) and the writing of reference code -- a bit like the X consortium. It will define conformance levels, and define what WWW is and what it isn't. Of the technical ares which are being resolved now, it is difficult to chose between security, interactivity, added semantics: they are all important and related. > 12. What did you think of the WWW'94 conference (how successful, > interesting, enjoyable, was it)? Great. It has a unique atmosphere as there were people from all walks of life brought together by their excitment for about web. As it was the first one, they hadn't met before, so a bit unique. It was very oversubscribed, as you know, so the next one will have to be a lot bigger . > 13. Please summarize briefly the current status of efforts to create an > International WWW organization with offices at CERN and MIT. Who might > participate, and what would they do? The aim is to form body to coordinate the evolution of the web. There is a lot of input from many sides, and a strongly felt need for some organisation who can define what is WWW and what isn't, defining levels of conformance, and refining the protocols. So the W3O will edit standards, and produce reference code implementing those standards. We'll have particpation from researchers, and an industry consortium. Members will be those who are investing resources in the web, and who want to ensure its stability and still its rapid development. MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) will use their experience of running the X Consortium here. We're putting together a list of founding members now, so call me if you're interested. > 14. What, for you, are the most exciting developments now occuring with the > WWW? > > 15. What do you think is the most exciting (thus far unrealized) potential > for the Web? > > 16. What about dangers -- for example, do you think the Web might become > unstable, and might destabilize other important systems? > > 17. Related to this point: what relationship do you think will evolve > between electronic agents and the Web? > > 18. What do you think about another danger: that the values which are the > foundation for the Internet (openness, collaboration, cooperation, free > movement of information) could be compromised as the Web evolves? > > 19. Please summarize how you think some of the following important future > directions for the Web will evolve, and explain something about their > significance: > > - the blurring of boundaries between Usenet News, E-mail etc and the Web Yes, that's a pet point of mine. The interesting thing is that while on ethe one hand I would like a singl euser interface metaphor for all these things, on the other hand one sees that at the lower levels of NNTTP, SMTP and HTTP the protocols also will grow to look more like other, as HTTP uses caching to distribute much-read documents in a self-organising way which if taken to the limit becomes the flooding of NNTP. So the boundaries will I suspect disappear at all levels. > - evolution of the Web into a tool for (real time) communication, > interactive collaboration, and understanding (versus just describing) reality Hey, there's a few thing sin togther here. Integrating real-time dat asuch as video confereces should be easy, when we have the real time protocols and the bandwidth. Collaboration involves much easier editing of hypertext, simultaneous editing, and hooking in groupware whichis much like hooking in video. Bythe "understanding" part I assume you are talking about putting more machine-understandable semantics into the web. This will start with tytped links -- we have been prototyping a discussion system for example with the WIT (W3 Interactive Talk) experiment. This addition of semantics is going to be essential if computers are to more of the work for us in manipulating this web, as atthe moment its only people who can read it. > - integration of real-time and virtual reality technologies on the Web Have we covered this? VR is the natural asymtote of the progression of graphics and multimedia formats. I expect the objects on the web which are atrgetted at people to eveolve toward VR. There will be otehr objects (such as large data arrays) which are really only useful for a program. > - development of enterprise-wide solutions that use the Web If it can hapopen for the world, it can happen for a company. Some companies already have very large internal webs. Youcan see out but not in, of course -- so we don't know many there are. > 20. Given the fact that most human systems go through a cycle -- which > seems to be accelerating -- characterized by birth, rapid growth, maturation > and obsolesence -- what is your guess about the likely lifespan of the Web > before it surrenders to some more advanced technology? I hope that the concept of the web as an information space independent of hardware type and location will continue to exost, jsut as the concept of a computer, say, or writing, never went out once invented. Just the instantiation of it will evolve very much. I hoper we will be smart enough to allow this evolution and never have to suddenly stop, put a "7" in front of all the URIs, and call it something else. > 21. Is there any additional point you would like to make about the Web? I think that's enough for now, that was a fair set of questions! > Thanks very much for your time and cooperation. You're welcome. Tim (c) Tim BL 1994 For publication in Internet World only, all rights reserved by the author. > Regards, > > > > Kris Herbst > Information Bank global@clark.net > 630 National Press Bldg Tel 202-662-7431 Fax 202-662-7433 > Washington, DC 20045 URL=http://www.clark.net/pub/global/home.html > >