6 ms·

Tim Berners-Lee: 25 years on, the Web still needs work

60 points by zhte415 13y ago

weland 13y ago
> With my fitness tracker, I want it to run all the time, even offline like a native app. But every day of my workout history will have a URL and I can link my friends to it. Slowly, slowly, we'll be reinventing web. I can't wait for 2020, when these brand new apps that structure every kind of data and make it uniformly accessible, in a form that makes it easy for automated programs to reason about both content and structure, are going to be all the rage. I'm actually excited about it. What makes me bitter is the fact that I have no idea what the fuck we were doing wrong in the early 2000s or so, because we should have been there already. It's easy to find scapegoats like Facebook, tightly clutching private data in poorly-designed, ever-changing access schemes that polarize the WWW, but I'm not entirely convinced they're the only ones to blame.
- rimantas 13y ago
  > I can't wait for 2020 You may as well wait till 2200 till someone finds a solution to the problem no one has. If we are going to do something slowly of quickly it is to finally understand what web is and what it isn't.
- toyg 13y ago
  > I have no idea what the fuck we were doing wrong in the early 2000s or so I don't think "we" were dong anything wrong. A lot of stuff now being used to accelerate web development simply wasn't mature enough, back then. Also, there are critical-mass effects that simply couldn't be done in early 2000s. Still, a lot of people were already working on these problems on a conceptual level.
  - weland 13y ago
    > A lot of stuff now being used to accelerate web development simply wasn't mature enough, back then. I think web development is speedy, and it also was fairly speedy in the 2000s, too. The web, on the other hand, not so much, and much of it is bloated and hampered by abstraction layers to an indecent degree. JS doesn't help, either. Something took a wrong turn at a point and the immature, but potentially capable technologies we had degenerated into today's clusterfuck.
camillomiller 13y ago
Am I the only one who isn't totally grasping this 25 years of the Web thing? The Web was "turned on" in 1991, am I right? Ok, Berners-lee had already been working on it since he had the idea in 1989, but this is like celebrating your birthday 9 months in advance because, you know, that day, your mom and dad...
pyalot2 13y ago
Timbl's words are meaningless when he speaks on the web as he's himself bending over backwards to appease corporate interests, control, restrictions and rubberstamped DRM.
- rimantas 13y ago
  Guess where the money for development of all the major browsers come from?
  - mattl 13y ago
    Google Ads.
nakedrobot2 13y ago
The Web is in great danger of "dying" partly because of Tim's awful endorsement of DRM baked into HTML5; Walled gardens by Apple, FB; disabling of web standards (webgl) by apple in their browser in order to favor their app store cash cow; NSA sodomy; lack of security; no easy way for laypeople to be truly secure and private.... It is a very sad couple of years and I don't know the solution.
- rimantas 13y ago
  Please tell me more how any of this will kill the web. Me using DRM somehow kill all the web sites not using it? Walled gardens? I guess this phrase has lost all the meaning by now and is just thrown around as if it means something. Does Apple limit which web sites you can visit on iPad? Or maybe, just maybe Apple actually helped the web by releasing the first phone with truly capable browser? What has Facebook to do with it? It is just a successful product, do you also go around shouting that Adobe is killing the design industry, just because majority of the work is done in Photoshop? Also, your lament about walled gardens and then whining about being truly secure and private does not really compute. I guess I have much more privacy inside the Apple's garden than in an open land owned by Google. Also, looks that you have no idea how much work Apple has done to propel the things that we now take for granted: canvas element, CSS transforms and animations, all the initial work on WebKit before Google joined in (yes, I know it is based on KHTML, but it has none of the aforementioned staff before). There is no wonder you don't know the solution: it is hard do find a solution to nonexistent problems. No matter what you think, technology is not a zero sum game, and the web is not supposed to rule it all.
  - nakedrobot2 13y ago
    When a concerted effort is made by an industry leader to kill open standards in favor of locking down users to their ecosystem (or "stack" as bruce sterling puts it) http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/bruce-sterling-on-why-it-stopped-making-sense-to-talk-about-the-internet-in-2012/266674/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/bruce-... http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-bruce-sterling/ http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2...
alexhektor 13y ago
Summary of the article: http://sumbees.com/s/ByAJ3D1ZANTeG2PgwxO7 http://sumbees.com/s/ByAJ3D1ZANTeG2PgwxO7
7952 13y ago
At some point people need to stop treating the web as something distinctly separate from the rest of human life. If a huge majority of business interaction is conducted on-line it is not e-business but just business. If you are socialising with friends on-line it is not social networking or IM, it is just socialising. Basic protections existed in law before the web and they should still exist now. That means that piracy is unlawful, but so is spying without a warrant. The web is just a set of protocols and does not have unique set of protections or privileges for anyone. Problems should be addressed by modifying the protocols in an open way.
endlessvoid94 13y ago
updated URL: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620198-93/tim-berners-lee-25-years-on-the-web-still-needs-work-q-a/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620198-93/tim-berners-lee...
chris_mahan 13y ago
What killed the web are js-app sites that don't work in mobile, along with the 1MB webpages that contain everything and the kitchen sink right on the page that also don't work in mobile (can't resize, font too small, javascript popups, flash popups, etc) What is needed is a return to the basic: plain html sites that don't assume unlimited bandwidth, that let the browser render the content, that don't need images, tables, etc. Most people have limited data plans and would like to keep most of it for music/video, not monstruously large web pages.
- erichocean 13y ago
  You forgot to mention CSS. That's a major reason why even non-JS sites render poorly on mobile.
  - chris_mahan 13y ago
    Yes, you're right. I was going to mention it, but I thought it would be understood. Sadly, because sites are so bad on mobile, mobile browsers don't do pinch-to-zoom anymore, and that messes my html-only (no css, no js, valid html5) pages utility.
ericmoritz 13y ago
The comments here describe doom and gloom of the web dying. I doubt the web is going anywhere. The future is going to hyperlink driven link data services that can power both native and web clients. I have started to architect such a solution for my employer and let me tell you, it is the freaking future!

60 points by zhte415 13y ago

> With my fitness tracker, I want it to run all the time, even offline like a native app. But every day of my workout history will have a URL and I can link my friends to it. Slowly, slowly, we'll be reinventing web. I can't wait for 2020, when these brand new apps that structure every kind of data and make it uniformly accessible, in a form that makes it easy for automated programs to reason about both content and structure, are going to be all the rage. I'm actually excited about it. What makes me bitter is the fact that I have no idea what the fuck we were doing wrong in the early 2000s or so, because we should have been there already. It's easy to find scapegoats like Facebook, tightly clutching private data in poorly-designed, ever-changing access schemes that polarize the WWW, but I'm not entirely convinced they're the only ones to blame.

rimantas 13y ago
> I can't wait for 2020 You may as well wait till 2200 till someone finds a solution to the problem no one has. If we are going to do something slowly of quickly it is to finally understand what web is and what it isn't.
toyg 13y ago
> I have no idea what the fuck we were doing wrong in the early 2000s or so I don't think "we" were dong anything wrong. A lot of stuff now being used to accelerate web development simply wasn't mature enough, back then. Also, there are critical-mass effects that simply couldn't be done in early 2000s. Still, a lot of people were already working on these problems on a conceptual level.
- weland 13y ago
  > A lot of stuff now being used to accelerate web development simply wasn't mature enough, back then. I think web development is speedy, and it also was fairly speedy in the 2000s, too. The web, on the other hand, not so much, and much of it is bloated and hampered by abstraction layers to an indecent degree. JS doesn't help, either. Something took a wrong turn at a point and the immature, but potentially capable technologies we had degenerated into today's clusterfuck.

camillomiller 13y ago

Am I the only one who isn't totally grasping this 25 years of the Web thing? The Web was "turned on" in 1991, am I right? Ok, Berners-lee had already been working on it since he had the idea in 1989, but this is like celebrating your birthday 9 months in advance because, you know, that day, your mom and dad...

pyalot2 13y ago

Timbl's words are meaningless when he speaks on the web as he's himself bending over backwards to appease corporate interests, control, restrictions and rubberstamped DRM.

rimantas 13y ago
Guess where the money for development of all the major browsers come from?
- mattl 13y ago
  Google Ads.

nakedrobot2 13y ago

The Web is in great danger of "dying" partly because of Tim's awful endorsement of DRM baked into HTML5; Walled gardens by Apple, FB; disabling of web standards (webgl) by apple in their browser in order to favor their app store cash cow; NSA sodomy; lack of security; no easy way for laypeople to be truly secure and private.... It is a very sad couple of years and I don't know the solution.

rimantas 13y ago
Please tell me more how any of this will kill the web. Me using DRM somehow kill all the web sites not using it? Walled gardens? I guess this phrase has lost all the meaning by now and is just thrown around as if it means something. Does Apple limit which web sites you can visit on iPad? Or maybe, just maybe Apple actually helped the web by releasing the first phone with truly capable browser? What has Facebook to do with it? It is just a successful product, do you also go around shouting that Adobe is killing the design industry, just because majority of the work is done in Photoshop? Also, your lament about walled gardens and then whining about being truly secure and private does not really compute. I guess I have much more privacy inside the Apple's garden than in an open land owned by Google. Also, looks that you have no idea how much work Apple has done to propel the things that we now take for granted: canvas element, CSS transforms and animations, all the initial work on WebKit before Google joined in (yes, I know it is based on KHTML, but it has none of the aforementioned staff before). There is no wonder you don't know the solution: it is hard do find a solution to nonexistent problems. No matter what you think, technology is not a zero sum game, and the web is not supposed to rule it all.
- nakedrobot2 13y ago
  When a concerted effort is made by an industry leader to kill open standards in favor of locking down users to their ecosystem (or "stack" as bruce sterling puts it) http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/bruce-sterling-on-why-it-stopped-making-sense-to-talk-about-the-internet-in-2012/266674/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/bruce-... http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2013-closing-remarks-by-bruce-sterling/ http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/04/text-of-sxsw2...

alexhektor 13y ago

Summary of the article: http://sumbees.com/s/ByAJ3D1ZANTeG2PgwxO7 http://sumbees.com/s/ByAJ3D1ZANTeG2PgwxO7

7952 13y ago

At some point people need to stop treating the web as something distinctly separate from the rest of human life. If a huge majority of business interaction is conducted on-line it is not e-business but just business. If you are socialising with friends on-line it is not social networking or IM, it is just socialising. Basic protections existed in law before the web and they should still exist now. That means that piracy is unlawful, but so is spying without a warrant. The web is just a set of protocols and does not have unique set of protections or privileges for anyone. Problems should be addressed by modifying the protocols in an open way.

endlessvoid94 13y ago

updated URL: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620198-93/tim-berners-lee-25-years-on-the-web-still-needs-work-q-a/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620198-93/tim-berners-lee...

chris_mahan 13y ago

What killed the web are js-app sites that don't work in mobile, along with the 1MB webpages that contain everything and the kitchen sink right on the page that also don't work in mobile (can't resize, font too small, javascript popups, flash popups, etc) What is needed is a return to the basic: plain html sites that don't assume unlimited bandwidth, that let the browser render the content, that don't need images, tables, etc. Most people have limited data plans and would like to keep most of it for music/video, not monstruously large web pages.

erichocean 13y ago
You forgot to mention CSS. That's a major reason why even non-JS sites render poorly on mobile.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  Yes, you're right. I was going to mention it, but I thought it would be understood. Sadly, because sites are so bad on mobile, mobile browsers don't do pinch-to-zoom anymore, and that messes my html-only (no css, no js, valid html5) pages utility.

ericmoritz 13y ago

The comments here describe doom and gloom of the web dying. I doubt the web is going anywhere. The future is going to hyperlink driven link data services that can power both native and web clients. I have started to architect such a solution for my employer and let me tell you, it is the freaking future!