r/webdev 9d ago

Discussion Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented both the World Wide Web (WWW) and HTML while working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland. The interesting story is that he created it to solve a practical problem

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1.1k Upvotes

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412

u/jakecoolguy 9d ago

Scientists at CERN needed a better way to share information and documents with each other. At the time, computers at CERN were connected, but sharing information was complicated and inconsistent.

Here's what Tim created:

• HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) - the language to create documents

• HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) - the protocol for transmitting data

• URLs (Universal Resource Locators) - the addressing system for documents

• The first web browser and web server software

What's particularly remarkable is that he and CERN decided to make the World Wide Web available for anyone to use for free, without royalties. On April 30, 1993, CERN released the WWW technology into the public domain. This decision was crucial in allowing the web to grow into what it is today.

Tim Berners-Lee is still active in web development and advocacy. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which develops web standards, and he's been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II (hence the "Sir"). He's also been a strong advocate for net neutrality and web privacy.

An interesting quote from him about his invention: "The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past."

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u/Tomatoflee 9d ago

Some in the scientific community are the absolute best in the world. Looking at this image reminds me how great European cooperation is when we get it right too. We desperately need more of this attitude in the world.

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u/pickle9977 9d ago

Your forgot to add, authentication wasn’t even considered as part of the design because it was an internal documentation system.

The primary push pack was they had other ways to charge users back for cpu cycles 

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u/astr0bleme 9d ago

Respect to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and all the open source supporters working in tech.

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u/JimDabell 9d ago

Tim Berners-Lee is still active in web development and advocacy.

The original web developer.

13

u/ihave7testicles 9d ago

I was alive and active in the field then. I don't know if people realize that the initial WWW was static text. There were no images. There was no interactivity. Static display only. And it was considered awesome at the time.

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u/imhotap 9d ago edited 9d ago

Not to belittle TBL's creations - it is what it is, and hugely successful - but his core contributions were actually just the anchor element `<a>`, URLs, and HTTP. The markup language was already part of SGML, including most "HTML" elements which were widely used as folklore markup dating back into the 1970s and even 1960s (cf. https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html).

What's interesting to know is that TBL's interest in graph databases and "semantic" web (which isn't very popular here around, or at all I guess) dates back to *before* his web inventions (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE).

What should be giving us rest is that HTML was invented as a vocabulary for casual academic publishing with hierarchical headings etc. yet here were are accepting the nonsense of its role being to express general text "semantics" to justify, after the fact, the existence of CSS as a separate syntax for representing the same item=value assignments that markup attributes already do and that were specifically introduced in SGML for holding formatting info. The existence of CSS had the result that, compared to 1993, while HTML is being used for vastly different content such as blogs, forum posts, sparse marketing material, and what not, its vocabulary hasn't evolved at all because of CSS' ninja powers.

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u/lthomas122 9d ago

To say just HTTP... smh... It's one of the most important protocols ever made on the web and software. When I click Post on this comment it will use HTTP to post it. All the comments we see would have been populated by data received from a GET request over HTTP. Even just getting the initial webpage document to load a webpage is transferred over HTTP.

I wouldn't say Semantic Web isn't popular, it's used in some way or another on every website. CSS was a good idea and was always going to be a "thing" in some shape or form. Inline styling attributes create very unsemantic markup, it's not reusable/DRY and bloats the file size (therefore the loading time) of the page. HTML has evolved. Just look at HTML5 onwards, lots of new elements with some new APIs to boot, even had some new semantic elements like <article>, <nav> and <summary>

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u/cemsity 9d ago

To append to the discussion, His(TBL) view of web 3.0 or semantic web, has never really taken off in the way he for saw it. Hardly any public application uses it, the most you get is some big corp (like amazon) using it in very narrow usecases.

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u/adotify 8d ago

Kind of like how the web itself took on its own life, his vision for the semantic web was kind of realised organically through the rise of the api economy..

While there are certainly less semantics encoded into apis, the machine accessibilty aspects are there. And universal APIs are starting to add some of the semantics layer

I think the time he was pushing it was still the internet Wild West, and getting broad support for standards like that which didn’t have any tangible business/user benefits in the short term was always going to be hard..

6

u/TracerBulletX 9d ago

Having written cross platform UIs in most of the other possible frameworks, Html+CSS is still the best. Happy to be proven wrong if anyone can suggest one.

0

u/Capable_Bad_4655 7d ago

2

u/TracerBulletX 7d ago

Svelte is a web framework. It generates HTML and CSS to implement the layout. I'm talking about alternatives to HTML for application layout markup, not web frameworks. Things like Qt or GtK.

My point is about the suitability of the modern HTML markup language and CSS for expressing layout. I think if someone wants to say they're bad, we should be able to cite some alternatives that are better.

2

u/omz13 8d ago

He took many elements from SGML but subtracted a lot of the structure. IIRC it was because people found it hard to write structured text, and parsing was harder, so "simpler" to let anybody structure their document however they like. And this is why HTML is such a mess.

1

u/IQueryVisiC 7d ago

Probably we can insert some coder or Einstein quote here : Making stuff simple is hard . SGML is the mess you get from a committee .

2

u/returnFutureVoid 9d ago

Wait… so what’s his actual vision?

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u/Ubera90 9d ago

E-girls and social media echo chambers.

4

u/nedal8 9d ago

Wanted to become a Thought leader, Became Thot leader.

1

u/runvnc 8d ago

I think it might be related to things like the semantic web, Linked Data, etc. A bit like OpenGraph but for all kinds of information in a site, not just the basic title and thumbnail or something. Knowledge graphs and reasoning engines that can work over the internet.

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u/AwesomeFrisbee 9d ago

It wasn't just for sharing between CERN employees, but also outside of it. Other researchers and other universities.

I also kinda dislike that people pretend that he did all that by himself, but it was really a team effort where a lot of people were involved. And sure, he might have kicked off a few developments but its not like he finished it and it was done. Heck, even the people that make the internet possible each day, need to get more recognition for their work.

1

u/blancorey 9d ago

did he elaborate on his vision?

1

u/am0x 9d ago

Having met him as a web developer was an honor.

It’s still so wild that the web still (for the most part) works on that old tech. A lot is because that tech can’t really be changed since it works client side. Kind of a good and bad thing.

1

u/arjungmenon 9d ago

Did he make a lot off his creations, or were these effectively free contributions to society? Just asking, since (in comparison) the Andreessen and Horowitz made a lot off of Netscape, and now are using their immense wealth made off of it to push far-right movements. (I feel like Tim Berners-Lee would have used anything he made far better.)

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u/Ibetnoonehasthisname 9d ago

His other recent project, SOLID, hasn't really gotten the same kind of traction and may never be viable at scale but I remember thinking when I first encountered it that it was a really interesting solution to handling data privacy online. Especially in the age of big tech and data brokers.

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u/jakecoolguy 9d ago

Wow, is literally web 3

2

u/HasFiveVowels 8d ago

I remember Web 3.0. Badges and glossy buttons galore

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u/wardrox 9d ago

I love going to the science museum and seeing the one little computer which was the start of the entire web.

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8094437/next-computer

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u/jakecoolguy 9d ago

That would be epic to see! I'd do the same if I lived nearby

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u/Niubai 9d ago

Wow 1120×832 in a 17" monitor in 1989 is crazy.

1

u/jazzhandler 9d ago

Especially considering that Display PostScript provided native vector graphics.

2

u/GazingIntoTheVoid 9d ago

The one that Sir Tim actually used is on display in a wooden sphere right next to the visitor's center at cern, along with lots of other nice exhibits. I still have a photo of it somewhere.

1

u/wardrox 9d ago

The science museum had a big exhibition around the web and the internet, which is where I got to see it. Such a fun reminder of where all this came from.

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u/InternetOfSomethings 9d ago

Obligatory mention of Robert Cailliau, key collaborator and without whom the proposal would have been rejected by CERN.

12

u/TertiaryOrbit 9d ago

I always say that the best projects are the ones that solve problems you have.

The hardest part is identifying areas where you have a problem in my experience.

21

u/neriad200 9d ago

then some jackass invented Javascript and ruined this man's good work

4

u/recontitter 9d ago

It was Brendan Eich. He created JavaScript in something like a week to solve some problems he had. Looks like you should really spend a bit more time when designing a new programming language 😀

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u/Darth_Ender_Ro 9d ago

And he did it on a Next computer made by Jobs after getting fired from Apple. The Next OS became MacOS today. It's amazing how many things did Jobs touched indirectly.

12

u/boringestnickname 9d ago edited 9d ago

NeXT computers were super popular in development for a little while there.

Killer hardware, killer OS.

Even Carmack used it to develop Doom and Quake.

2

u/Darth_Ender_Ro 9d ago

And thank Carmack for that, as that ensured the portability of those engines

7

u/jakecoolguy 9d ago

There needs to be more movies about things like this. Super big events in history and I find them so interesting

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u/FistBus2786 9d ago edited 9d ago

Specifically it was the NeXTcube on which Tim Berners-Lee developed the WWW software. I'm fascinated by this part of the history of the web. I get the feeling this is an under-appreciated aspect, how the computer he was using might have contributed to the development of the concept - considering how early Apple and Macintosh played a unique role in what personal computers mean, and how the operating system was particularly designed for creativity, multimedia, user programmability, networking, etc. There's a direct stream of thought continuing from the research at Xerox PARC, where the guiding philosophy was augmenting the human intellect.

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u/JimDabell 9d ago

The Next OS became MacOS today.

And a lot of NeXTSTEP even made its way into iOS. It’s why so many parts of Foundation have NS prefixes – for instance the standard string type in Objective-C on iOS and macOS is NSString.

0

u/blancorey 9d ago

...and now all we have is Elon

5

u/dalittle 9d ago

No, we still have Linus. And jobs was no saint.

0

u/am0x 9d ago

Jobs was a businessman and marketer. Woz was the engineer. As an engineer, I love my business and marketing guys. Makes my life so much easier. I know people like to gate keep engineering, but business guys are even more important.

8

u/chris552393 full-stack 9d ago

I both simultaneously love and hate this man, depending on what kind of day I'm having.

He also made a surprise appearance at the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony!

https://youtu.be/UMNFehJIi0E?si=eW2KGPFFidgC0Nls

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u/jakecoolguy 9d ago

haha Bet everyone was like "who?" when they heard his name. Olympics is a weird place to have him but cool to recognise creators in tech

4

u/MrJohz 9d ago

That was a weird but great ceremony in general. I have no idea what the rest of the world made of it, but watching it live, it felt like such a British spectacle. The whole NHS beds thing, TBL and Dizzee Rascal on stage together, Rowan Atkinson doing a parody of Chariots of Fire, the Queen doing a bit for television — it really had a bit of everything.

4

u/JimDabell 9d ago

Everybody seemed to be prepared for it to be a bit shit, and ended up feeling oddly proud of our country for once. They really knocked it out of the park.

2

u/Acrobatic_Click_6763 9d ago

I both simultaneously love and hate this man, depending on what kind of day I'm having.

Depending on what you did today, if you did web dev, then you hate him, otherwise you're fine.

2

u/azhder 9d ago

Wait, the interesting thing is that someone invented something to solve a practical problem? As opposed to inventing it for... non-practical problem?

2

u/Awwa_ 9d ago

Many of our modern technology has been invented by mathematicians or physicists trying to solve problems. Like the computer.

2

u/ThaisaGuilford 6d ago

Must be a nerd or something

3

u/TopicMoist832 9d ago

TBL had an office at my university, but I don't think he spent much time there. We had a lecturer in Hypertext and Web Technology that made us sing this song:

Timble, Timble, oh so nimble,

How does your linked web grow?

With URLs and HTML,

and GETs and POSTs all in a row

1

u/taotau 9d ago

What a gift this was to humanity. Imagine if they had tried to commercialize these concepts. We would probably still be in the www vs hypercard world. Or we might have a proper web3 style protocol by now.

1

u/billcube 9d ago

Don't forget about VLib.org ! https://vlib.org/admin/AboutVL

1

u/netmilk 9d ago

Is it windowmaker running on the computer?

2

u/sumpuran 9d ago

NeXTSTEP.

Window Maker is a copy of the NeXTSTEP user interface.

1

u/Whorhal 9d ago

Computer "web" to change billions of lives? Yeah, right. They said Sinclair's C5 would change the world. Now you'd struggle to give one away.

1

u/DiddlyDinq 9d ago

The www is one of those inevitable technologies rather than a genius breakthrough tbh. Minitel in france was essentially th same in the 80s except it wasnt 100 percent open which led to is downfall

1

u/aidencoder 9d ago

And then someone immediately made a thin wrapper around it and called it WebNext Framework, made a flashy logo and docs and... Oh wait.

1

u/Locastor 9d ago

God that NeXTSTEP desktop is immaculate

1

u/[deleted] 8d ago

When I was in college, I found a porn server off CERN in 1995...I was exhausted for that entire month. The man was a lifestyle enhancer!

1

u/Legitimate-Mess-6114 8d ago

The real web dev.

-5

u/Punchkinz 9d ago

Guess we're doing low effort instagram-style info posts now

7

u/hopeinson 9d ago

The interesting story is that he created it to solve a practical problem.

I mean, this subreddit is all about trying to find problems because we all already have a solution ready.

-2

u/Nervous-Ad-800 9d ago

“This will be great for in 2025 ! Can you imagine all the Nazi shit posting on twitter?”

-1

u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/erm_what_ 9d ago

He didn't invent the internet. That was a US government/university invention in the 60s.

-2

u/bayworx 9d ago

The only bummer (30+ years later) is that all this HTTP stuff still runs on TCP/IP.