Tim Berners Lee

Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don’t care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.

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.

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.

Everybody who runs a Web site knows we’re not assured of compatibility, and we could end up with a split.

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.

We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges.

You affect the world by what you browse.

Celebrity damages private life.

That idea of URL was the basic clue to the universality of the Web. That was the only thing I insisted upon.

I think IT projects are about supporting social systems-about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.

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.

The Mobile Web Initiative is important – information must be made seamlessly available on any device.

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

Web pages are designed for people. For the Semantic Web, we need to look at existing databases.

The Domain Name Server (DNS) is the Achilles heel of the Web. The important thing is that it’s managed responsibly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

Compared even to the development of the phone or TV, the Web developed very quickly.

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.

Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information.

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.

Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.

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.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

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.

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.

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.

Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.

I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.

The important thing is the diversity available on the Web.