Contract for the Web a potential fix.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the creator of the first hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) client and server software, has looked back on the World Wide Web’s 30-year history – and hasn’t liked all he has seen.
The Web, most historians agree, was effectively born when European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) Tim Berners-Lee – at the time not a Sir – came up with a proposal for linking together the disparate concepts of hypertext and the burgeoning Internet to form an information management system. Using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Domain Name System (DNS), and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Berners-Lee effectively created what we now know as the World Wide Web – by far and away the single most popular use of the Internet in history.
‘Today, 30 years on from my original proposal for an information management system, half the world is online. It’s a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come, but also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have yet to go,’ Berners-Lee writes in a retrospective piece for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) he founded and directs. ‘The web has become a public square, a library, a doctor’s office, a shop, a school, a design studio, an office, a cinema, a bank, and so much more. Of course with every new feature, every new website, the divide between those who are online and those who are not increases, making it all the more imperative to make the web available for everyone.
