| > 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. |
"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.