- From: jk05308 <jk05308@alltel.net>
- Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2001 23:59:09 -0500
- To: www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org
From his own account at http://www.w3.org/1999/04/13-tbl.html "This is very important from the point of view of the World Wide Web Consortium cutting itself out of the loop as much as possible." --Tim Berners-Lee, talk to the LCS 35th Anniversary celebrations, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1999/April/14. Why would Tim say this in a prior address, but now the W3C is trying to put itself into the middle of the process! What has changed? Maybe Tim needs to re-read his own speech. "The Consortium has a whole technical domain "Technology and Society" which recognizes that, at the end of the day, if we're not doing something for the Web of People, then we're really not doing something useful at all." -- Tim's concluding remarks at that speech. "So that's the story of how the Web Consortium came to LCS. And the rest is more or less history and acronyms, and I won't to into the acronyms in case you are frightened about them. But basically things have been happening... The fundamental thing about the space. About this Web, as I said, is that anything can refer to anything. Otherwise it's no fun. You've got to be able to make the link to anything. It's no good asking people to put things on the Web, saying that anything of importance should have this "URL", if you then request anything else. To make such an audacious request you have to then release anything else. So that requires that the Web has completely minimalist design. We don't impose anything else. It has to be independent of anything. The great challenge, really the raison d'etre initially for getting the Web protocols out, was to be independent of hardware platform: to be able to see the stuff on the mainframe from your PC and to be able to see the stuff on the PC from the Mac. To get across those boundaries was at the time so huge and strange and unbelievable. And if we don't do things right it will be huge and strange and unbelievable again: we could go back down that route very easily. It was important to get it should be independent of software. The World Wide Web originally was a client program called "World Wide Web". I eventually renamed the program because I didn't want the World Wide Web to be one program. It's very important that any program that can talk the World Wide Web protocols. (HTTP, HTML,...) can provide equivalent access to the information. It's important that the Web should be independent of language and culture, and I could now talk for two hours just about that. In the Consortium, just as we have a Web accessibility initiative addressed the question of accessibility, we have an activity which looks specifically about internationalization. But then you have to add culture, then you're talking about a whole lot more than just using Unicode and just making sure that you can make the letters go up and down the page instead of across the page. It's important that the Web should be independent of quality of information. I don't want it to be somewhere where you would publish technical reports only after you had finished. If you can link to anything I want this to be part of the process. So the review of the technical report and the scribbling of the original note which led to the idea that became the project which resulted in the technical report should all be there and they should all be linked together. So it's very important that you should be able to instantly go in there and edit. (Now actually I'm very sorry that this is not my machine so I'm not using my editor. Otherwise I would be able to just go into this slide and put the cursor in the middle and edit the slide.) At the same time, when I use the word "quality," it's important to remember that the idea of quality is completely subjective. So the Web shouldn't have in it any particular built-in notion of what quality means at all. A really exciting thing would be if we could scale that ability to make intuitive leaps. I've always wanted to be able to do this with a group, of very bright, very enthusiastic people really interested in specific overlapping areas, say LCS, or all the people who are trying to find a cure for AIDS, or whatever. There are one, two, three, four, five, six dimensions I have mentioned along which documents on the Web can vary. Throughout all the history and through the future evolution it's been very important to maintain this invariance with all the fancy new ideas that came in. Every now and again we get a new suggestion that flagrantly violates one of these areas, and we have to find ways to turn it around and express it in a way which does not. Now, we can't, every time somebody wants to think of a new idea, a new term, a new column in a database, have a global meeting to decide about it. We have to let people invent new terms all the time as they do anyway, but just make sure there's no ambiguity. Also we have to allow people to combine more than one vocabulary in the document. We don't just want to make something which works; we want to make something which can evolve. " ** end of quotes from Tim Berners-Lee's article ***** Tim, if RAND does not do this then nothing does ... If the W3C approves RAND then you can toss your six dimensions in the trash, for the Internet will become the wholly owned subsidiary of USA Inc. Jerry Kreps Lincoln, NE
Received on Sunday, 30 September 2001 00:59:35 UTC