Top 100 Tim Berners-Lee Quotes
#1. It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.
Tim Berners-Lee
#2. It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years.
Tim Berners-Lee
#3. Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.
Tim Berners-Lee
#4. I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.
Tim Berners-Lee
#5. We could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically. To do that, we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.
Tim Berners-Lee
#6. Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.
Tim Berners-Lee
#9. In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.
Tim Berners-Lee
#10. I should be able to pick which applications I use for managing my life, I should be able to pick which content I look at, and I should be able to pick which device I use, which company I use for supplying my internet, and I'd like those to be independent choices.
Tim Berners-Lee
#11. Customers need to be given control of their own data-not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them.
Tim Berners-Lee
#13. [With AI] Somebody's going to have to think of a completely new algorithm, a new way of doing goal-based planning.
Tim Berners-Lee
#14. Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.
Tim Berners-Lee
#15. IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.
Tim Berners-Lee
#16. What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web ... Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.
Tim Berners-Lee
#17. The Google algorithm was a significant development. I've had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.
Tim Berners-Lee
#18. I think IT projects are about supporting social systems - about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.
Tim Berners-Lee
#19. Most of systems still depended on some central node to which everything had to be connected [ ... ]. I wanted the act of adding a link to be trivial. If i was, then a web of links could spread evenly across the globe.
Tim Berners-Lee
#20. I don't mind being, in the public context, referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. What I like is that image to be separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.
Tim Berners-Lee
#21. There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole - until now.
Tim Berners-Lee
#22. Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.
Tim Berners-Lee
#23. The Domain Name Server (DNS) is the Achilles heel of the Web. The important thing is that it's managed responsibly.
Tim Berners-Lee
#24. I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions.
Tim Berners-Lee
#25. One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don't.
Tim Berners-Lee
#26. The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future.
Tim Berners-Lee
#27. Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assist our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.
Tim Berners-Lee
#28. Everybody who runs a Web site knows we're not assured of compatibility, and we could end up with a split.
Tim Berners-Lee
#29. When I invented the web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.
Tim Berners-Lee
#30. It's the whole cat and mouse game between the readers and writers that makes the web work.
Tim Berners-Lee
#31. The world's urban poor and the illiterate are going to be increasingly disadvantaged and are in danger of being left behind. The web has added a new dimension to the gap between the first world and the developing world. We have to start talking about a human right to connect.
Tim Berners-Lee
#32. I don't believe in the sort of "Eureka!" moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.
Tim Berners-Lee
#33. It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn't even have words like click and jump and page.
Tim Berners-Lee
#34. Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.
Tim Berners-Lee
#35. We shouldn't build a technology to colour, or grey out, what people say. The media in general is balanced, although there are a lot of issues to be addressed that the media rightly pick up on.
Tim Berners-Lee
#36. Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.
Tim Berners-Lee
#37. The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect - to help people work together - and not as a technical toy.
Tim Berners-Lee
#38. Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.
Tim Berners-Lee
#39. Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy.
Tim Berners-Lee
#40. If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL or have to deal with HTML. That was a surprise to me - that people were prepared to painstakingly write HTML.
Tim Berners-Lee
#42. I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.
Tim Berners-Lee
#43. The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things.
Tim Berners-Lee
#44. The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.
Tim Berners-Lee
#45. What we believe, endorse, agree with, and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web. We all have to ensure that the society we build with the Web is the sort we intend.
Tim Berners-Lee
#46. A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things.
Tim Berners-Lee
#47. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.
Tim Berners-Lee
#48. You can't propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.
Tim Berners-Lee
#49. It's time to recognise the Internet as a basic human right, that means guaranteeing affordable access for all, ensuring Internet packets are delivered without commercial or political discrimination, and protecting the privacy and freedom of Web users regardless of where they live.
Tim Berners-Lee
#50. When it comes to professionalism, it makes sense to talk about being professional in IT. Standards are vital so that IT professionals can provide systems that last.
Tim Berners-Lee
#51. If different cultures connect with each other, they are less likely to want to shoot each other.
Tim Berners-Lee
#52. E-mail is interesting. We can't live with it, and you can't live without it.
Tim Berners-Lee
#53. On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable.
Tim Berners-Lee
#54. What is a Web year now, about three months? And when people can browse around, discover new things, and download them fast, when we all have agents - then Web years could slip by before human beings can notice.
Tim Berners-Lee
#55. When you go onto the internet, if you really rummage around randomly then how do you hope to find something of any of value?
Tim Berners-Lee
#56. AI is not just heading for our industry, it will radically change the machinery we use in marketing.
Tim Berners-Lee
#57. I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they've got a wonderful long-term plan.
Tim Berners-Lee
#58. The search button on the browser no longer provides an objective search, but a commercial one.
Tim Berners-Lee
#59. The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect,
Tim Berners-Lee
#60. Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.
Tim Berners-Lee
#61. Freedom of connection with any application to any party is the fundamental social basis of the internet. And now, is the basis of the society built on the internet.
Tim Berners-Lee
#62. I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books.
Tim Berners-Lee
#63. Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.
Tim Berners-Lee
#64. What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do.
Tim Berners-Lee
#65. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our web-like existence in the world . We clump into family , association, and companies.
Tim Berners-Lee
#66. Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.
Tim Berners-Lee
#67. We need to look at the whole society and think, "Are we actually thinking about what we're doing as we go forward, and are we preserving the really important values that we have in society? Are we keeping it democratic, and open, and so on?"
Tim Berners-Lee
#68. I invented the Web just because I needed it, really, because it was so frustrating that it didn't exit.
Tim Berners-Lee
#69. I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways. So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.
Tim Berners-Lee
#70. We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.
Tim Berners-Lee
#72. The Mobile Web Initiative is important - information must be made seamlessly available on any device.
Tim Berners-Lee
#73. Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information.
Tim Berners-Lee
#74. The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.
Tim Berners-Lee
#75. Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.
Tim Berners-Lee
#76. I found myself answering the same questions asked frequently of me by different people. It would be so much easier if everyone could just read my database.
Tim Berners-Lee
#77. I'm very aware there are lots of other people who are just bright and working just as hard, with just the same dedication to make the world a good place.
Tim Berners-Lee
#78. Web applications will become more and more ubiquitous throughout our human environment, with walls, automobile dashboards, refrigerator doors all serving as displays giving us a window onto the Web.
Tim Berners-Lee
#79. The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.
Tim Berners-Lee
#80. The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way-not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures. The U.S. should demonstrate that it is prepared to share control with the world.
Tim Berners-Lee
#81. We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges.
Tim Berners-Lee
#82. If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!
Tim Berners-Lee
#83. People keep asking me what I think of it now that it's done. Hence my protest: The Web is not done!
Tim Berners-Lee
#84. When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.
Tim Berners-Lee
#85. When somebody has learned how to program a computer ... You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.
Tim Berners-Lee
#86. Web pages are designed for people. For the Semantic Web, we need to look at existing databases.
Tim Berners-Lee
#88. The most important thing that was new was the idea of URI-or URL, that any piece of information anywhere should have an identifier, which will allow you to get hold of it.
Tim Berners-Lee
#89. The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.
Tim Berners-Lee
#90. I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached.
Tim Berners-Lee
#91. To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.
Tim Berners-Lee
#92. In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted.
Tim Berners-Lee
#93. Universality has been the key enabler of innovation on the Web and will continue to be so in the future.
Tim Berners-Lee
#94. Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it's all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well.
Tim Berners-Lee
#95. If you are not on the web, you will have problems accessing services.
Tim Berners-Lee
#96. I would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. That meant as close as possible to no rules at all.
Tim Berners-Lee
#97. There was a time when people felt the internet was another world, but now people realise it's a tool that we use in this world.
Tim Berners-Lee
#98. It's amazing how quickly people on the internet can pick something up, but it's also amazing how quickly they can drop it.
Tim Berners-Lee
#100. It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return.
Tim Berners-Lee
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