Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fishetti is subtitled "The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor"--but don't be put off by this overblown subtitle. This popular book is worth reading and contains some gems of information.
E.g., did you know that the first name that Berners-Lee gave to his software code for the Web was "Enquire"? "When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for Enquire Within upon Everything, a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parents' house outside London. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money" (p. 1). Shades of Harry Potter!
Or, did you know that the first development platform that Berners-Lee used was Steve Jobs' NeXT? (From the Glossary, "NeXT. Name of the company started by Steve Jobs, and of the computer it manufactured, that integrated many novelties such as the Mach kernel, Unix, NeXTStep, Objective-C, drag-and-drop application builders, optical disks, and digital signal processors. The development platform I used for the first Web client.")
The Glossary at the end of the book is of especial value as a ready compilation of straightforward translations of the many terms, acronyms, and abbreviations found on the Web.
Here are a two more short quotations from Weaving, just to provide more of a sense of the book's message:
Speaking of the W3C--"Starting a consortium, therefore, represented the best way for me to see the full span of the Web community as it spread into more and more areas. My decision not to turn the Web into my own commercial venture was not any great act of altruism or disdain for money, of which I would later be accused" (p. 85).
More about W3C--"The consortium's two original gools were to help the Web maintain interoperability and to help it maintain 'evolvability.' We knew what we needed for interoperability. Evolvability was just a buzzword. but if the consortium can now create an environment in which standarization processed become a property of how the Web and society work together, then we will have created something that not only is magic, but is capable of becoming ever more magical" (p. 190).
Although the Web and the Internet are relatively young, they do have a history and it's interesting and valuable to explore that history. I've been surprised that some Computer Science, Educational Technology, and Multimedia professionals don't know the contributions of Cerf, Engelbart, Berners-Lee, and other pioneers to the fields in which they are working.
(Harper San Francisco, 1999, ISBN 0-06-251586-1, See this web link for background information and references related to Weaving the Web, http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving, including a version of the Glossary with hypertext, Chapter 1, and a Timeline history of the Web and Internet with hypertext.)
11:42:01 AM 
|
|
