September 4, 2006 at 18:49Tim Berners-Lee Doesn't Understand What Web 2.0 Is
World Wide Web Founding Father and Director of the W3C Consortium, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, gave an interview to IBM developerWorks , which discusses the development of the Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee says it’s very foolish to make assumptions about the future popularity of technology by extrapolating current growth rates. Very often, exponential growth at some point begins to slow down sharply and comes to naught. Therefore, it is hardly possible to make any assumptions about the future development of the Internet. At the same time, the benefits of the World Wide Web for society are quite obvious. All conflicts in the world are due to misunderstanding. If we consider that the Internet as a communication technology reduces the level of misunderstanding, then it certainly makes the world a better place.
Tim Berners-Lee singles out disputes over the principle of network neutrality from current problems, which he constantly writes about on his blog . It is bad that this topic is hardly discussed outside the United States. Even in Europe, people know little about this serious problem. Some even hear for the first time the phrase "network neutrality."
The most interesting part of the interview is dedicated to promising web technologies. Of course, Tim Berners-Lee considers his brainchild, the Semantic Network, to be the most important and promising among them. For example, Berners-Lee has several student interns at the university. Under the guidance of a professor, they developed an Ajax program with which you can “pull out” any data from the Semantic Network, put it on a calendar or on a map, or use it in another way. Such a beautiful demonstration that can be done with RDF level programming. Tim Berners-Lee believes that such programming is the future. Here, the programmer does not need to think much about the syntax or data structure, so writing applications will become much easier.
Speaking about programming technologies that are now fashionable, Tim Berners-Lee speaks very positively about Ajax as a universal platform for creating applications running through a browser. He says that you can create very functional user interfaces using the HTML DOM or SVG DOM, so the future is definitely for Ajax applications.
As for the "innovative nature" of Web 2.0, here Tim Berners-Lee speaks very categorically. He does not really understand what Web 2.0 is. He considers this a “slang word”, the meaning of which is not known to anyone at all. When it comes to bringing people together, blogs and wikis, says Tim Berners-Lee, then this is real Web 1.0. Actually, for this the World Wide Web was created. All the technologies that are used in Web 2.0 applications have existed for a long time and are well known, so there is nothing new here. The idea of using the Internet to bring people together is the original idea of the WWW.
Blogs and wikis are great technologies, says Tim Berners-Lee, because they allow people to create interactive projects together. But in the future, new, more advanced tools for collaboration will certainly appear: not only semantic wiki , but also other technologies that have yet to be invented.
Tim Berners-Lee says it’s very foolish to make assumptions about the future popularity of technology by extrapolating current growth rates. Very often, exponential growth at some point begins to slow down sharply and comes to naught. Therefore, it is hardly possible to make any assumptions about the future development of the Internet. At the same time, the benefits of the World Wide Web for society are quite obvious. All conflicts in the world are due to misunderstanding. If we consider that the Internet as a communication technology reduces the level of misunderstanding, then it certainly makes the world a better place.
Tim Berners-Lee singles out disputes over the principle of network neutrality from current problems, which he constantly writes about on his blog . It is bad that this topic is hardly discussed outside the United States. Even in Europe, people know little about this serious problem. Some even hear for the first time the phrase "network neutrality."
The most interesting part of the interview is dedicated to promising web technologies. Of course, Tim Berners-Lee considers his brainchild, the Semantic Network, to be the most important and promising among them. For example, Berners-Lee has several student interns at the university. Under the guidance of a professor, they developed an Ajax program with which you can “pull out” any data from the Semantic Network, put it on a calendar or on a map, or use it in another way. Such a beautiful demonstration that can be done with RDF level programming. Tim Berners-Lee believes that such programming is the future. Here, the programmer does not need to think much about the syntax or data structure, so writing applications will become much easier.
Speaking about programming technologies that are now fashionable, Tim Berners-Lee speaks very positively about Ajax as a universal platform for creating applications running through a browser. He says that you can create very functional user interfaces using the HTML DOM or SVG DOM, so the future is definitely for Ajax applications.
As for the "innovative nature" of Web 2.0, here Tim Berners-Lee speaks very categorically. He does not really understand what Web 2.0 is. He considers this a “slang word”, the meaning of which is not known to anyone at all. When it comes to bringing people together, blogs and wikis, says Tim Berners-Lee, then this is real Web 1.0. Actually, for this the World Wide Web was created. All the technologies that are used in Web 2.0 applications have existed for a long time and are well known, so there is nothing new here. The idea of using the Internet to bring people together is the original idea of the WWW.
Blogs and wikis are great technologies, says Tim Berners-Lee, because they allow people to create interactive projects together. But in the future, new, more advanced tools for collaboration will certainly appear: not only semantic wiki , but also other technologies that have yet to be invented.