Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

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

If you are not on the web, you will have problems accessing services.

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

Web applications will become more and more ubiquitous throughout our human environment, with walls, automobile dashboards, refrigerator doors all serving as displays giving us a window onto the Web.

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

The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.

What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web … Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.

People keep asking me what I think of it now that it's done. Hence my protest: The Web is not done!

I'm an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.

Universality has been the key enabler of innovation on the Web and will continue to be so in the future.

It was the academic community who wired up their universities so it was put together by smart, well-meaning people who thought it was a good idea.

Cool URIs don't change

I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures.

The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.

Celebrity damages private life.

I don't mind being, in the public context, referred to as the inventor of the World Wide Web. What I like is that image to be separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.

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.

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.

Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assist our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.

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.

[With AI] Somebody's going to have to think of a completely new algorithm, a new way of doing goal-based planning.

In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted.

I suppose it's amazing when you think how many things people get involved in that don't work.

Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy.

It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years.

I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years.

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.

I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions.

It's a new medium, it's a universal medium and it's not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently.

Things can change so fast on the internet.

On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable.

The concept of the Web is of universal readership.

The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies.

What we believe, endorse, agree with, and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web. We all have to ensure that the society we build with the Web is the sort we intend.

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.

If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL or have to deal with HTML. That was a surprise to me - that people were prepared to painstakingly write HTML.

As more and more people awaken to the threats against our basic rights online, we must start a debate - everywhere - about the web we want.

E-mail is interesting. We can't live with it, and you can't live without it.

AI is not just heading for our industry, it will radically change the machinery we use in marketing.

It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return.

Forming of a web of information nodes rather than a hierarchical tree or an ordered list is the basic concept behind HyperText.

What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do.

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.

It's amazing how quickly people on the internet can pick something up, but it's also amazing how quickly they can drop it.

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.