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Tim Berners-Lee (1955–)

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist, the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Life and career

Born 8 June 1955 in London, he took a degree in physics from the University of Oxford (1976) and, while working as a contractor at CERN, proposed an information-management system in March 1989. By late 1990 he had implemented the first version of the Web: the HTTP protocol, the HTML markup language, the URL addressing scheme, and the first web browser and server. The Web was released royalty-free in 1993, and in 1994 he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to steward open web standards. He has since held positions at MIT and Oxford.

His later work centres on keeping the web open and returning control of data to users — the semantic web and linked data, and the Solid project for decentralised personal data. He was knighted in 2004, appointed to the Order of Merit in 2007, and received the 2016 Turing Award “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.”

The World Wide Web

The Web Berners-Lee designed rests on a small set of pieces that fit together: a way to name resources (the URL), a protocol to request and transfer them (HTTP), and a markup language to express documents and the links between them (HTML). The design’s defining quality is that these standards are simple and open — anyone could implement them, and no central authority controlled what could be published or linked. That openness, and his insistence on keeping it, is what allowed the Web to scale from a research tool at CERN to global infrastructure.

Keeping the web open

Through the W3C and his later projects, Berners-Lee has worked to keep the web’s standards open and to push back against the concentration of data in a few hands. The semantic web and linked data extend the addressing idea so that URIs name not only documents but things and relationships; the Solid project aims to give individuals control of their own data by separating it from the applications that use it. These are advocacy and design agendas as much as technical programmes.

Where his work sits

Berners-Lee’s contribution is the design of a small set of simple, open standards — URLs, HTTP, HTML — whose significance lies in their universality and in his insistence that they stay free and open; the web’s scale is the consequence.

Key works

The World Wide Web — HTTP, HTML, URLs (1989–91)
The World Wide Web Consortium (1994)
The Solid project