IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. 43, NO.
2, JUNE 2000
Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti
Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny
of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor
Book Review
—Feature by
MURIEL ZIMMERMAN,
MEMBER, IEEE
Manuscript received February 15, 2000;
revised March 14, 2000.
The reviewer is with the
Writing Program,
University of California, Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA
(email: mzimmer@humanitas.ucsb.edu).
IEEE PII S 0361-1434(00)04492-1.
Book Publisher:
New York: Harper
Collins Publishers, 1999,
226 pp., including index.
0361–1434/00$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
217
Index Terms—Hypertext, privacy, Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web.
T im Berners-Lee’s claim to be
the inventor of the World Wide
Web has not been disputed. While
a consulting physicist at CERN
Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland,
Berners-Lee developed three
specifications central to the Web:
the URL scheme for giving every
“page” a standard address; the
HTTP protocol for accessing those
pages; and the HTML language for
formatting hypertext documents.
By 1990, the first Web server was
up and running on his desktop
computer at CERN.
Berners-Lee’s fundamental vision
for the Web is about anything being
potentially connected to anything
else. Once someone has posted
material to the Web, that material
should be accessible, subject to
authorization, by anyone, with any
type of computer, in any country.
Further, it should be possible
to link to anything on the Web
so that others can find it. It is
crucial to Berners-Lee’s vision that
the Web remain decentralized: a
new person can start to use it
without asking for access from
anyone else, and a new user can
use the Web in any way he or she
prefers. Ego-surfing (looking for
occurrences of one’s own name)
is as much a right as medical
research aimed at saving lives.
In 1994, Berners-Lee moved
to the MIT Laboratory for
Computer Science, where he
founded the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C). The work
of W3C focuses on developing
common protocols to enhance
the evolution of the Web, and
written into the W3C constitution
is the stipulation that the software
it produces in support of its
work be available to the public.
Anyone can join in the testing
of new protocols by downloading
tools from the consortium’s site:
http://www.w3.org/
The thorny issues of security
and quality of information on
the Web are central subjects.
Berners-Lee argues that Public
Key Cryptography (PKC) offers a
way to achieve four basic aspects
of Web security: authenticity,
confidentiality, integrity of
messages, and nonrepudiability.
PKC provides a form of encryption
in which an outgoing message
is scrambled according to the
receiver’s public key; the message
can only be decoded by a receiver
who has the unique matching
private key to unlock it. Since its
development more than twenty
years ago, the United States
Government has blocked the
export of strong cryptography
by classifying it as munition.
In Berners-Lee’s view, PKC is
a technology for implementing
trust on the Web, for ensuring
that people are who they say they
are so that information can be
trusted and electronic transactions
enabled.
On another aspect of privacy,
Berners-Lee’s position is that
people should be able to surf
the Web anonymously or as a
defined entity, and they should
be able to control the difference
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between the two. W3C is creating
a Web-shopping technology that
will allow automatic negotiation
between a shopper’s browser and
a store’s server, leading to an
agreement about privacy. The
Platform for Privacy Preferences
Project (P3P) will give a computer
a way of describing its owner’s
privacy preferences and demands,
while it gives servers a way of
describing their privacy policies,
all implemented so that machines
can understand each other and
negotiate any differences.
On the subject of quality
of information, specifically
“objectionable content,”
Berners-Lee is a strong opponent
of government censorship. The
Consortium has developed the
Platform for Internet Content
Selection (PICS) protocol to allow
parents to select content for their
children on the basis of an open
set of criteria. A program can
be installed on any browser that
lets parents block the display of
sites that carry a pre-selected
rating. Berners-Lee argues that
government censorship is not so
effective as software filtering tools.
A nation’s laws can restrict only
in that country; filters can block
content no matter where it comes
from on the Web, and they can
block content for users who object
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. 43, NO. 2, JUNE 2000
to it without removing the material
from the Web. With PICS, people
can customize their own objectives
without imposing them on others.
The “ultimate destiny” of the
World Wide Web referred to in
the title will require substantial
technological advances. The Web
of the future will reside in a world
in which a computer screen is
available wherever we want it and
where access is permanent. The
experience of using a computer will
be more like getting out a pen than
getting out a lawnmower. While
the Web is now a medium in which
a few publish and most browse,
Berners-Lee’s vision is for a time in
which sharing what you know or
think is as easy as learning what
someone else knows or thinks.
He believes that the Web of the
future will facilitate more powerful
collaboration between people and
also between computers.
For the Web to become a better
place for human collaboration,
we need schemes for strong
authentication of group members,
good hypertext editors, annotation
systems similar to paper sticky
notes, and tools for procedures
such as online voting and review.
For the Web to become a better
place for computer collaboration,
Berners-Lee envisions the
Semantic Web. Very little of the
information on the present Web
is in a form that machines can
naturally understand or process
meaningfully. The first step to
creating the Semantic Web is to
put data on the Web in a form
that machines can naturally
understand. The Consortium is
addressing this challenge with
development work on Resource
Description Framework (RDF), a
framework for using XML for data
rather than just for documents.
If HTML and the Web made all
online documents look like one
huge book, the Semantic Web
will, in this vision, make all the
documents in the world look like
one huge database.
Despite the claim in his title,
Berners-Lee makes it clear that he
did not do all the work. He credits
Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and
Douglas Englebart (among others)
with hitting on similar concepts.
He happened to come along, he
writes, with the time, the right
interest, and the inclination—after
hypertext and the Internet had
come of age. Weaving the Web is a
lively account of the growth of the
Web and a challenging speculation
about the potential of the Web to
contribute more to the solution of
human problems.