Tim Berners-Lee
Credited with "inventing the Internet" (or World Wide Web). That's quite a stretch.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2019-02-05 |
Tim Berners-Lee is credited with "inventing the Internet" (or World Wide Web). That's quite a stretch. What happened is in 1989, he ripped off a few ideas around HyperText that had been around since the 1970's in something called SGML for IBM's documents, and been implemented already in Apple's HyperCard, and created what became HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) -- which was a horrid little implementation of better predecessors, and the W3C was created to slow progress to a snails pace, and make sure all the stupidest ideas got equal time and space with the best and simplest ones. So the "web" was created by a committee that couldn't agree on whether mass genocide is a good or bad thing, with Tim getting a seat at the table because his cluster-fuck of a hack of much better ideas, happened to be the thing people congealed around.
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Of course Tim got all sorts of accolades for borrowing other people's ideas poorly. And to be fair, there was a slight derivation in there: when he ripped off hyper-text (and subsetted the crap out of it), he did have to marry it to a new network protocol (TCP/IP), so he did do some work. But if the guy had a basic understanding of design, logic, code, fonts, formatting, security, or anything else, he likely would have implemented it completely differently. It took until about 2014 and HTML5 to un-screw what he'd screwed up. Though by this time, there was so much conflicting legacy, that it came with other problems.
What Tim really wanted to create was something closer to Wikipedia, than the world-wide-web, he was just so bad at it, that we got something else. (And if Wikipedia founders were better at what they did when they started, they would have designed a structured/semantic version of wikipedia -- but I'm getting off-topic).
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I don't dislike Tim, and think he did add value to the world. I just think the credit given is way outsized with what is deserved, and ignores the mistakes made that were easy to predict at the time, if he had any domain knowledge in software, information systems, or user interface design. Again, that doesn't make him a bad guy. But we paid for him being the pioneer, over what some others might have done. Giving him accolades and knighting him? That's like giving it to the guy who won a lottery, for having the foresight of buying a ticket.
🔗 More
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🔗 Links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
- Vanity Fair did a crappy article fawning over Tim: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/the-man-who-created-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets
