Re-inventing the Web

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Unlike Vice President Al Gore, Tim Berners- Lee hasn't claimed to have invented the Internet. But he did invent the World Wide Web, which has made the Internet truly useful to people.

In his initial research paper, written in 1991 for his employer at the time, the CERN physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland, he summarized what he had in mind:

"The WWW project merges the techniques of networked information and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system. The project represents any information accessible over the network as part of a seamless hypertext information space." Since then, as millions of users have gone online, that early vision hasn't changed. "It's all about human communication though shared knowledge," Berners-Lee said the other day in a talk at Laboratory for Computer Science on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the English-born scientist has worked since 1994. "In universal space," he noted, "anything can refer to anything." At MIT, Berners-Lee serves as director of the W3 Consortium, the official body that coordinates Web standards. At 43, his creative juices still flow. But Berners-Lee wonders whether the world is making the most of his brainchild. "Do you own a digital camera?" he asked a luncheon guest before giving his lecture. Thereupon, he pulled out his camera, inserted a memory chip and snapped away at his companions. "Have you thought about putting the pictures of your kids on a Web page where their grandparents can see them and link them to their own pages?" he wanted to know. If Berners-Lee had his way, the White House Web pages and other such vital sites would be interactive in ways that go well beyond leaving an e-mail message for the president -- a message unlikely to be read. "You should be able to change the home page by adding your comments, to which others would add their comments and so on, with all of it being tied together through links," he says, adding: "As you can read, so can you write. If you notice a connection, make a link." Berners-Lee calls this process -- which has little to do with the current big push for more multimedia bandwidth -- "being creative with others." He recognizes that it needs "a stable infrastructure." (The consortium places a high priority on improving Web security, striving to devise "digital signatures" that create "a web of trust.") As Berners-Lee puts it: "When you turn on your computer, what you should see is information, what you should deal with is information. You should be able to create it, to absorb it; you should be able to exchange it freely in the informational space. The computer should just be your portal into the space." Some of that will be in the form of documents, such as poetry, to which only human beings can relate, while some of it will be in structured tables, best digested by fast machines. His point is that all of it should work seamlessly together, along with the digital photos that he took during lunch. "They'll be on a Web site," Berners-Lee promises, "but not one that you'll have access to." Andrew J. Glass is a Washington, D.C.-based columnist for Cox Newspapers. His e-mail address is aglass

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