A bright idea is OK, but getting people to adopt common standards is impeded by patents.
A lot of company knowledge is held on spreadsheets and Powerpoint slides because companies need to see summaries. But the data has lost its semantics, so it's not usable.
Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.
Any time during that exponential growth of the Web, it could have stalled. We were never very confident until 1993.
Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
At W3C we have a working group that had to stop work on a project for 18 months to answer a patent issue. This affected the livelihood of people in companies that were doing really good work.
Blogs are editable in a limited way, HTML is too complex, but at least blogs allow people to be a little creative.
Celebrity damages private life.
Compared even to the development of the phone or TV, the Web developed very quickly.
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.
Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.
Everybody who runs a Web site knows we're not assured of compatibility, and we could end up with a split.
I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.
I don't mind being referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. I like that image to be separate from private life.
I think IT projects are about supporting social systems-about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.
I thought, All we need is a decent, really intuitive editor for creating this stuff. But if you're going to use it collaboratively, you have to very good access control.
I've always wanted to take an arbitrary thing, a data file, and if it's got something that can be mapped, drop it into a map and see what occurs without programming.
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.
In the past, scientists were trained to do things top-down. Even software engineering is about taking an idea and breaking it into smaller pieces to work on-but the software project is itself part of something larger.
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.
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.
Microsoft said recently that nearly 50 percent of people need to make some sort of adjustment to their system to interact with it.
Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.
Moving control of data from someone with 20 years' experience of working with it to someone else can lead to problems.
Nobody has added to the 10-year, 20-year vision of what the Web should fundamentally be and whether it should be changing.
Now that people understand standards and business more, they know there's always another browser 'round the corner and the view of Web and its technology is maturing accordingly.
On the Web, you can allow people to talk to each other, but you have to guarantee that they know who's going to have access to the conversation.
Phishing is mostly done via email, but it involves HTML, so W3C will address this issue.
Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.
Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.
That idea of URL was the basic clue to the universality of the Web. That was the only thing I insisted upon.
The cases we've seen involving patents on Web technologies have been spurious at best.
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.
The Domain Name Server (DNS) is the Achilles heel of the Web. The important thing is that it's managed responsibly.
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.
The important thing is the diversity available on the Web.
The Mobile Web Initiative is important - information must be made seamlessly available on any device.
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.
The original idea of the Web was about supporting the way people already work socially, but this doesn't happen with a lot of IT projects.
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.
The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.
There could still be a huge battle which leaves a big mess and fragments the Web into two pieces whenever a new feature comes along.
There is always work to do on interfaces. I've been playing with Ajax technologies to explore that space because it can be a lot better.
They may call it a home page, but it's more like the gnome in somebody's front yard than the home itself.
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.
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.
We've seen the development of Web technologies but, in the demos we've seen, people are using semantic technology for a specific application.
Web pages are designed for people. For the Semantic Web, we need to look at existing databases.
Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.
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.
Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information.
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.
You affect the world by what you browse.
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