Communications of the ACM

P H O T O G R A P H B Y A L E X A N D E R B E R G

of testing the potential of the NeXT machine, a new computer architecture designed by Steve Jobs.

There were many types of computer systems in existence at the time—documentation systems, help systems, note-taking systems, paper-publishing systems—but each tended to focus on just one type of information. Berners-Lee wanted to break down the separation between those systems: “I realized the Web had to be universal. It had to be completely without attitude about what you were doing with it.” It also had to work no matter the type of computer, the programming language, or the language or culture of the user.

His one requirement was that everybody in the world label everything they had with what he originally called a UDI, or universal document identifier. That would later become known as a uniform resource locator (URL), and is now becoming a URI, uniform resource identifier. “That’s a very big ‘ask,’ so you can’t ask anything else,” he says.

Having made that “ask,” he then set out to make everything else about his system easy to swallow, which led to a set of fairly arbitrary design choices as he was creating Hypertext Markup Language, such as deciding whether to use round or square brackets and which type of slash to use.

“Whether those slashes were for-
ward slashes or back slashes didn’t af-
fect how the Web worked,” he says, “but
it does affect how other developers re-
act to it, so the trick was to use design
languages that they already used.”
Berners-Lee made Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) look like
other Internet protocols, such as Sim-
ple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMPT)
and Network News Transfer Proto-
col (NNTP). He designed Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML) to look
like Standard Generalized Markup

WHEN HE FIRST came up with the idea for the World Wide Web in 1989, Sir Tim Berners- Lee had trouble get-
ting people to grasp the concept. If he
gave a lecture to a room of 100 people,
demonstrating how his browser/edi-
tor could jump from one document
to another when he clicked on a hy-
pertext link, he recalls, the response
would be a collective “So what?”
“Maybe two or three at the back
would get it. Most people wouldn’t,”
says Berners-Lee.

Hypertext was not new. CD-ROMs
had links that allowed navigation
from one page of, say, an encyclope-
dia to another, but “people didn’t
understand the power of the link if it
could link to everything conceivable,”
he says. “That’s a paradigm shift, that
if you click on it, it can go to anything
on the planet.”
It is for creating that paradigm
shift—by inventing the World Wide
Web, the URL naming scheme, the
HTTP protocol, and the HTML mark-
up language—that Berners-Lee has
been designated to receive the 2016
Turing Award in June, the 50th time
the prize will have been bestowed.

The Web has become so funda-
mental, he says, that it has become as
difficult to imagine the Web did not
exist, as it once was to imagine that
it should. “The paradigm shift is im-
penetrable both ways,” Berners-Lee
says. “It was impossible to explain to
people what the Web would be like
then, and now when you talk to mil-
lennials they can’t understand what
the problem was.”
Berners-Lee was working at
CERN, the European Organization
for Nuclear Research, in Geneva at
the time. He had an undergraduate
degree in physics from The Queen’s
College, Oxford, but no formal train-
ing as a computer scientist, although
he had built his own computer and
written software, and it was that
combination of skills CERN needed.

He created the Web, in large part, to make his own life easier. There were perhaps 10,000 people working for CERN at the time, he says, but only about 3,000 on the actual campus; others were coming and going between there and other institutions. Berners-Lee thought it would be useful to have an online collaborative space where people could share ideas, and where people who came along later could follow the decision-making process by clicking through the links.

However, just bringing co-workers together did not seem like enough. The Web, he believed, should allow anybody anywhere to create information and link to it.

By 1989, the Internet was beginning
to become generally connected, and
Berners-Lee felt that linking everything
to everything would spur users’ creativi-
ty. “I’d been harping on about joining all
information together for ages,” he says.
“What was critical at that point was that
my boss finally let me just do it as a side-
project.”
That boss, Mike Sendall, could not
justify the project as having a direct
relation to CERN’s goals. Instead,
he decided it could be a good way

Weaving the Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee created a paradigm shift that changed the world with his invention of the World Wide Web, Hypertext Transport Protocol, and Hypertext Markup Language.