Which are your favorite Tim Berners-Lee quotes?
Tim Berners-Lee is a British engineer and computer scientist. He is most famously recognized as the inventor of the ‘World Wide Web’. His invention was the result of his brilliance in implementing the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet.
Berners-Lee has then won numerous prestigious awards for his significant contribution to global society and technology, among which is the honor to be knighted by ‘Queen Elizabeth II’, getting appointed to the ‘Order of Merit’, and being elected a ‘Fellow of the Royal Society’.
He also works as the director of the ‘World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’, an organization especially in charge of the continual development of the internet.
Here’s our collection of the best Tim Berners-Lee quotes:
50 Famous Tim Berners-Lee Quotes
1. “I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures.” – Tim Berners-Lee
2. “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
3. “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.” – Tim Berners-Lee
4. “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
5. “Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information.” – Tim Berners-Lee
6. “It’s difficult to imagine the power that you’re going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.” – Tim Berners-Lee
7. “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
8. “I suppose it’s amazing when you think how many things people get involved in that don’t work.” – Tim Berners-Lee
9. “The Mobile Web Initiative is important – information must be made seamlessly available on any device.” – Tim Berners-Lee
10th of 50 Tim Berners-Lee Quotes
10. “That idea of URL was the basic clue to the universality of the Web. That was the only thing I insisted upon.” – Tim Berners-Lee
11. “It’s interesting that people throughout the existence of the web have been concerned about monopolies.” – Tim Berners-Lee
12. “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
13. “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
14. “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
15. “Web pages are designed for people. For the Semantic Web, we need to look at existing databases.” – Tim Berners-Lee
16. “One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That’s kind of important to me, and that’s also kind of important to the whole future of the internet… obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.” – Tim Berners-Lee
17. “Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.” – Tim Berners-Lee
18. “One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn’t have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.” – Tim Berners-Lee
19. “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
20th of 50 Tim Berners-Lee Quotes
20. “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
21. “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
22. “One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don’t.” – Tim Berners-Lee
23. “I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years.” – Tim Berners-Lee
24. “Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.” – Tim Berners-Lee
25. “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
26. “I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions.” – Tim Berners-Lee
27. “Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.” – Tim Berners-Lee
28. “The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.” – Tim Berners-Lee
29. “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
30th of 50 Tim Berners-Lee Quotes
30. “Innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make.” – Tim Berners-Lee
31. “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
32. “The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.” – Tim Berners-Lee
33. “Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.” – Tim Berners-Lee
34. “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
35. “Everybody who runs a Web site knows we’re not assured of compatibility, and we could end up with a split.” – Tim Berners-Lee
36. “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
37. “When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.” – Tim Berners-Lee
38. “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
39. “Things can change so fast on the internet.” – Tim Berners-Lee
40th of 50 Tim Berners-Lee Quotes
40. “We shouldn’t build a technology to color, 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
41. “We can’t blame the technology when we make mistakes.” – 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. “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
44. “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
45. “I’m an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.” – Tim Berners-Lee
46. “You affect the world by what you browse.” – Tim Berners-Lee
47. “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
48. “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
49. “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
50. “Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.” – Tim Berners-Lee
Summary
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Which are your favorite Tim Berners-Lee quotes? Leave a comment below.
