 - Tim Berners-Lee is the creator of the World Wide Web and director of the coordinating body for Web development, the
W3C. Berners-Lee credits Vint Cerf and Bob Khan (who defined the Internet protocol (IP) that allows computers to
exchange packets of information) with the invention of the Internet, but it was Tim Berners-Lee who created the most widely used part of
the Internet, the part that we call the World Wide Web (often abbreviated "WWW" or called "the Web"). Its outstanding feature is hypertext, a
method of instant cross-referencing. The introduction of Tim Berners-Lee's hypertext system revolutionized the way the Internet was used.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee began work at CERN on the first World Wide Web server ,which he called "httpd", and the
first client, which he called "WWW". In the beginning, WWW was a WYSIWYG hypertext
browser/editor that ran in the NeXTStep environment. It is interesting to note that before choosing the name "World Wide Web" for his global hypertext system, Berners-Lee
considered the name "Mine of Information" (MOI) but thought it might be "un peu egoiste" (a little egotistical). He abandoned the name
"The Information Mine" (TIM) for the same reason, and didn't use "Information Mesh" because he thought it sounded too much
like "mess".
By 1990, the World Wide Web was available within CERN and by 1991, it was available to anyone using the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee has never profited personally by creating the World Wide Web. Instead, he gave away his proprietary rights in the
belief that the Web needed to be an open system if it was to grow and become universal. Berners-Lee currently occupies
the 3Com Founders chair at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and has been the recipient of numerous awards,
including a spot in Time magazine's list of the 100 greatest minds of the century.
When asked what surprised him most about how the World Wide Web has turned out thus far, Tim Berners-Lee said that he was surprised at how many ordinary people were willing to learn how to write code using the hypertext markup language he developed.
 |
Learn more about Web services development |
| Operating system virtualization and Web services: Web services development and operating systems virtualization may be two different types of abstraction, but virtualization techniques look like they can have positive impact. |
| Creating rich Web service clients with Flash and Flex: Flash and Flex, titans within the RIA universe, now have XML, Ajax and scripting language functionality that make them better suited for Web services development. |
| Oracle links SOA, data services, BI and BAM: When it comes to incorporating data services, business intelligence (BI), and business activity monitoring (BAM), Oracle has not lost sight of its database roots. |
| Is Ruby on Rails ready for enterprise SOA?: Ruby on Rails promises ease in RESTful SOA development, but for it to move up to enterprise class, developers need to know how to make it scalable. |
| 2006 JavaOne coverage: A compilation of stories written about the JavaOne conference held in San Francisco this past May. |
| Chapter of the week: Security and Ajax: This chapter, excerpted from Ajax in Action, discusses security-related concerns that have particular implications for Ajax. |
| Chapter of the week: XML Web services: This chapter, excerpted from Core C# and .NET, takes a look at the pluses and minues of implementing and consuming Web services in a .NET environment. |
| Chapter of the week: Working with Beehive Web services and JSR 181: This chapter, excerpted from Pro Apache Beehive, explores the Web service capabilities that are a part of Apache Beehive. You'll learn about JSR 181, Web Services Metadata for the Java ... |
| Chapter of the week: Introduction to Web services technologies: This chapter, excerpted from Service-Oriented Architecture: A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services, focuses on the standards that make up the Web services platform and how Web ... |
| LAST UPDATED: |
11 Nov 2005
|
 |
Do you have something to add to this definition? Let us know.
Send your comments to techterms@whatis.com
|
|
More resources from around the web:
|
|
Show me everything on 
