[dominiek]

I think that Berners-Lee and W3C get way too much credit for the web. And this is an incredibly arrogant statement by Mr. Berners-Lee.

Facebook has in-fact done some serious web innovation the last years and W3C has completely dropped the ball. Facebook and Twitter have been catalyzing internet adoption and the general spread of information.

Mr. Berners-Lee's obsession about content-silos shows that there is a serious disconnect between the current state of the web and W3C. The web was about content and documents fifteen years ago, now it's about the flow of data.

I know Berners-Lee is a big Linked Data advocate, but the approach that's being taken by the W3C is painfully slow and doesn't take into account the fluidity of information.

This is one of the reasons why developers (and even semantic web developers) have resorted to non-W3C technologies more and more: JSON, Javascript-wrappers, Webkit, client-side routing, non-REST HTTP requests, IOSockets/Coment, streaming apis, etc.

The web is emergent and out of control. Deal with it. Technologies and tools compete for attention and adoption. You snooze, you lose.

As for the 'content silos': Are you fucking kidding me? 'Content' being stuck in Facebook is not going to happen, in fact, the content is going to flow more and more. If you mark something as 'only my friends can see this', it will leak. Don't want to be tagged in a picture? Well, you have no choice. Face recognition will get you soon.

The internet, thanks to social web, is a giant copy machine. There's a huge shitstream of content and your attention and the activity around it is the thing that matters. Who cares about the damn content.

So maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the W3 Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something, instead of bitch about the companies that actually advance the web.

So instead of bitching about the companies and people that actually advance the web and change the world, maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something...

[keyist]

> I think that Berners-Lee and W3C get way too much credit for the web. And this is an incredibly arrogant statement by Mr. Berners-Lee.

I also think that green is a totally awesome color, and that we can breed birds with horses to produce pegasii. For more attacks on the W3C at best tangential to Mr. Berners-Lee's actual essay, read on.

> Facebook has in-fact done some serious web innovation the last years and W3C has completely dropped the ball. Facebook and Twitter have been catalyzing internet adoption and the general spread of information.

I'll conveniently ignore companies like Flickr, who innovate without compromising data portability: http://laughingmeme.org/2010/05/18/minimal-competence-data-a...

> Mr. Berners-Lee's obsession about content-silos shows that there is a serious disconnect between the current state of the web and W3C. The web was about content and documents fifteen years ago, now it's about the flow of data.

Those URI thingamabobs that send you to content or documents? The web isn't about that anymore. It's about a golden shower of data, flowing down the firehose. You see, when people look up stuff on Wikipedia, they don't care about the page they're on, but the activity data on who's flowing in and out of it.

> I know Berners-Lee is a big Linked Data advocate, but the approach that's being taken by the W3C is painfully slow and doesn't take into account the fluidity of information.

See I took "flow of data" from my previous paragraph, applied my nifty FaceTwit thesaurus to it, and turned up "fluidity of information". More of my fluids to come.

> This is one of the reasons why developers (and even semantic web developers) have resorted to non-W3C technologies more and more: JSON, Javascript-wrappers, Webkit, client-side routing, non-REST HTTP requests, IOSockets/Coment, streaming apis, etc.

Look at me! I'm namedropping web technologies more than hip-hop artists namedrop the Notorious B.I.G or Tupac. I can do this all day: XML Servlet configotrons. Buffered packet gumballs. NoSQL big data Hadoopian piglets mashed up with tagsoup gravy. Activity ICMP hosepipe of RSS-killa sauce.

Pay special attention to my mention of non-REST HTTP requests. You see, REST HTTP requests are a W3C technology. But non-REST HTTP requests? That's not W3C, that's those innovative guys down the hall, second room to the right.

> The web is emergent and out of control. Deal with it. Technologies and tools compete for attention and adoption. You snooze, you lose.

Now I switch from my awesome web developer hat to my social media evangelist hat. This paragraph is not only a segue, it also panders to those of you playing buzzword bingo!

> As for the 'content silos': Are you fucking kidding me? 'Content' being stuck in Facebook is not going to happen, in fact, the content is going to flow more and more. If you mark something as 'only my friends can see this', it will leak. Don't want to be tagged in a picture? Well, you have no choice. Face recognition will get you soon.

I mentioned flow of data previously. But now it's the content that's flowing. The ultra-innovative internet catalyzer Facebook won't be able to keep your data private. Why? Because I say so, that's why.

> The internet, thanks to social web, is a giant copy machine. There's a huge shitstream of content and your attention and the activity around it is the thing that matters. Who cares about the damn content.

Want to know the internet's secret? No one watches Youtube videos. No one shares links to content on Twitter and Facebook. They just look at the activity around it. In fact, if my pal Tim BL didn't write this _content_, I'd still have some activity to do! Furious activity in fact, in the privacy of my room while penning my next ode to Facebook and Twitter.

Btw if you haven't been keeping up on my use of liquids, we've gone from flow to fluidity to shitstream. Which mirrors the general coherence of this comment.

> So maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the W3 Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something, instead of bitch about the companies that actually advance the web.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the other _companies_ that are members of the World Wide Web _Consortium_ better start rolling up their sleeves. They aren't doing anything to advance the internet.

> So instead of bitching about the companies and people that actually advance the web and change the world, maybe it's time for the 'Web Founder' and the Web Museum to roll up their sleeves and do something...

That last paragraph was so good, I'ma say it twice while flipping the order of my sentence. That's activity, you see. With activity, you can copypasta content, because no one cares about content anymore. And now that I have proven my point, my point is proven.

[keyist]

Switching back to my regular voice, because there are points to make that I can't shoehorn into the fisking format.

"Berners-Lee and W3C get way too much credit for the web". Putting 'Web Founder' in airquotes. This blatant disrespect is what angered me the most and influenced my decision to fisk instead of a polite rebuttal.

Tim Berners-Lee:

- was the first to execute on the idea of combining hypertext with TCP/IP and DNS

- wrote the first browser and HTTP server

- gave it away instead of encumbering it with patents or royalties

- has the humility to downplay his accomplishment and share the credit where it is due: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids (under "Did you invent the Internet?")

- continues to work on the web to make sure it remains open and transparent instead of resting on his laurels assured of his place in history. The Scientific American essay is but the most recent example

I'm not sure what more he would need to do to be considered the founder of the web.

[blasdel]

Of course, he did a lot of amazingly awesome stuff as a hacker in the early 90s — but he started turning out turd after turd as soon as his W3C took control over web standards from the IETF and he became a bureaucrat.

He produced a masterwork, but I can't think of a second one — from my POV all the awesome post-IETF web developments happened despite the W3C's best efforts to derail them.

[csytan]

I'm sure you've written better comments in the past, but countering his argument with sarcasm and no facts shows no class at all.

This is exactly the kind of reply I don't want to see on HN.

[dkarl]

It's upvoted because it demonstrates why the original comment is exactly what shouldn't be on HN: an empty stream of popular jargon that turns argument into a hipper-than-thou fashion show of buzzwords and name-dropping. HN should be more than a beauty contest to see who can sound most like a guy who's going to get rich someday. keyist's comment may be ugly, but it's insightful and just.

[igrekel]

I agree but I'll add that the parent comment wasn't very high either.

[SoftwareMaven]

I completely agree with you. I'm saddened by the number of up-votes, given the tone of post doesn't encourage continued discussion nor add substantively to the information in the comments.

What I think is particularly sad is that I bet he/she could have given a good argument that helped people understand the dangers of a Facebook-monopolized Internet.

[Tichy]

Facebook dominating the web is a horror scenario.What good could you see about it? Do you want to pay a Facebook tax for every online innovation you can come up with? Do you want to be at their mercy for the survival of your business?

My only hope is that in the long run freedom of innovation will always be stronger than a walled garden like Facebook.

I thought Berners-Lee invented the web - how can he get too much credit for that? Hypertext as an idea existed before that, I think, but he did it.

[LostInTheWoods2]

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Youtube, etc. These services thrive because they fill one or more holes that exist in the protocol space of the web. Eventually, these services should just be made into standard web protocols.

What is truly disturbing is the slow pace at which new protocols are folded into the web. Perhaps that is a problem that should be addressed. Until then, we will keep seeing all these services being built on top of the existing web structure instead of as an extension to it.

It would be nice to see one day, a web infrastructure that is as well managed and patched as Linux is.

[stanleydrew]

I don't understand what you're getting at. Why do new "protocols" need to be folded into the web?

The web can't ever be as well-managed and patched as Linux is. The web doesn't have a pre-defined scope. It's more like a transport layer for content and other services. And I'd like to see it stay that way; companies will compete and innovate way faster than any small standards committee or group of maintainers will.

[zandorg]

I know Ted Nelson personally. He invented the word hypertext. I'd say inventing that word proves him the father of hypertext, though Tim was the midwife.

[Tichy]

Sorry, but inventing the word really isn't good enough. I think the concept might actually predate the web for a couple of decades (too lazy to check Wikipedia right now). I seem to remember seeing an article on HN about a guy who invented it all long before there were even computers.

Also, maybe Tim found the right mix of ingredients. No idea, but perhaps early hypertext concepts did not include distributed documents, for example?

[zipdog]

There was an idea called the Memex in 1946 that was an inspiration for subsequent hypertext ideas. And a Belgian in the 1920s had a "steampunk" web, but it built more on the idea of inter-text referencing (like most encyclopedias use). Ted Nelson justifiably gets the credit for the term. There were a couple of distributed document with hyper-linkage ideas floating around in 1989 and 1990, so possibly Tim was just the one to put enough of it together and it would have happened within a year or two anyway, but there are certain aspects to his particular putting-it-together (the ease of writing HTML for display and content for example) that were important to the web becoming what it did, and possibly might not have happened at all without his push.

[giardini]

It's just a bloody pointer - give credit to someone who truly deserves it - the fellow who invented pronouns!

[mattmanser]

Most business now have to pay a Google tax in one way or the other, whether it be adwords, content building, link building or paying for SEO.

That's just the cost of entering a particular marketplace.

Think of it as rent.

[pyre]

Paying for SEO isn't a 'Google tax.' It's marketing. That's like saying that when you start a business you have to pay the 'Yellowpages tax.'

[Tichy]

Still, Google can't prevent you from running an internet business. I have heard some cases of companies prevailing without Google's approval.

Most businesses need to pay for marketing, of course running businesses is not free.

[swombat]

Moreover, rent to be paid to those who actually built the building.

If Facebook adds as much value to the web as Google did with their search engine, then they more than deserve getting "rent".

[kragen]

In between the sandstorms of irrelevant buzzwords, you did successfully make the case that Facebook is strong and getting stronger.

But we already knew that, so it's an easy case to make.

Tim's point is that Facebook is harmful and getting more harmful. That's entirely consistent with your point, despite the tone of disagreement that pervades your post.