Tim Berners-Lee Quotations

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.

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

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.

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

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

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

It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.

You affect the world by what you browse.

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 world's urban poor and the illiterate are going to be increasingly disadvantaged and are in danger of being left behind. The web has added a new dimension to the gap between the first world and the developing world. We have to start talking about a human right to connect.

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.

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

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

We can't blame the technology when we make mistakes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things.

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

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

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

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

I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways. So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.

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.

My own personal preference is that the consumer, the individual person should be protected because individual people and the difference between individual people and the diversity we have between people on the planet is so important.

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.

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

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

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.

It's interesting that people throughout the existence of the web have been concerned about monopolies.

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

When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.

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

One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don't.

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.

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.

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

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.

The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future.

Things can change so fast on the internet.

When you go onto the internet, if you really rummage around randomly then how do you hope to find something of any of value?

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.

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.

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.

I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The important thing is the diversity available on the Web.

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

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

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

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

Microsoft said recently that nearly 50 percent of people need to make some sort of adjustment to their system to interact with it.

The recommended strategy is to employ 'smart' buying practices to reduce acquisition and support costs, including software asset management, and increase the use of standards-compliant software,'

The original idea of the Web was about supporting the way people already work socially, but this doesn't happen with a lot of IT projects.

There could still be a huge battle which leaves a big mess and fragments the Web into two pieces whenever a new feature comes along.

There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.

On the Web, you can allow people to talk to each other, but you have to guarantee that they know who's going to have access to the conversation.

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

The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I'll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you're not worrying so much about the underlying syntax.

We need to look at the whole society and think, "Are we actually thinking about what we're doing as we go forward, and are we preserving the really important values that we have in society? Are we keeping it democratic, and open, and so on?"

I think in general it's clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings, and the Web's a form of communications, so it generally should be good.

There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole - until now.

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.

Celebrity damages private life.

The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.

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.

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.

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.

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

The more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform - a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.

A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things.

It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.

The concept of the Web is of universal readership.

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!

[The internet] ought to be like clay, rather than a sculpture that you observe from a distance.

If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!

Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.

Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.

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

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