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Given the way the Web has become the dominant communications technology of our time, one could argue that Berners-Lee is the guy who invented the future. Yet up to now he has remained reticent about how he did it. Weaving the Web is therefore the definitive account of how the World Wide Web came to be. No one else could have written this book--the history of the Web straight from the source. Yet it's a characteristically modest and self-effacing book, in which Berners-Lee relegates the story of how he came to create the Web to the first 90 pages. They make riveting reading as they tell a story of ingenuity and persistence and vision; but most of all they tell a remarkable parable about civic values. The Intellectual Property Rights embodied in the Web could have made Berners-Lee the richest man in history. Yet he turned his back on the money and set his creation free. He was determined from the outset that the Web should belong not to him but to us.
The remaining 130 pages are devoted to an account of how he implemented this commitment to the public domain by setting up the World Wide Web Consortium--the organisation he created to ensure that that the Web continues to develop without becoming the proprietary reserve of the powerful corporations which aspire to control it. Through this account--of protocol wars and technical disputes and unbearable pressures--runs a consistent vision challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that regards the Web simply as a wonderful new way of doing business. Of course, it is a new way of doing business--but in Berners-Lee's view that is perhaps the least interesting thing about the Web. He continues to view the Web as he has always seen it--as a medium that can codify the sum total of human knowledge and understanding. Weaving the Web is an unforgettable testimony to that heroic vision. --John Naughton
Book Description
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee quietly laid the groundwork for the WWW (and consequently Hypertext) in 1980, created a prototype in 1990 and unleashed it to the world in 1991. Now the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organisation responsible for overseeing the WWW's growth and development, Tim Berners-Lee provides in this book the inside truth about where the WWW came from and the remarkable discoveries that made it the platform to today's communications revolution.
But Weaving the Web is not only an absorbing account of incredible scientific discovery. The author also offers an important analysis of the Web's future development and its likely impact on business and society, which has been fully updated in this new paperback edition.
The Web has literally changed the world. Weaving the Web is the only book that can look back with absolute authority to its creation, and forward to its continuing development.
