30 years of the web: reflections ahead of The Web Conference 2019: transcript

Key points

• The web exploded because decades of pent-up ideas for commerce, wikis and online collaboration suddenly found expression, like a dam bursting.
• At CERN the web was not mainstream work, so it had to be shown to people; clicking a link to a page from Hawaii made a viewer's eyes widen.
• Simple HTML pages with pictures and links could be read by any browser following the standard, giving competing browsers and an open ecosystem.
• One speaker says the web's defining value is neutrality, which depends on policy makers resisting dominance by market players.
• Another says the early web was meant for good, but it now feels as if it has turned on us, so the economics, law, philosophy and politics must be discussed.
• The conference runs in San Francisco from May 13 to 17, with special tracks on health, the open web, and web and society.

Chapters

1. 0:00Why the web took off like a dam bursting
2. 1:11Showing the web to people at CERN
3. 2:11HTML and an open ecosystem
4. 2:43Neutrality as the web's core value
5. 3:49Protecting the good of the web going forward
6. 4:52Invitation to The Web Conference 2019

Full transcript

0:00So the web, you know, there was this kind of pent-up demand. People didn't necessarily realize it, but there was this demand. And as soon as there was a single system that got, you know, wide acceptance, it's like you have 20, 30, 40 years of ideas and ambitions for what you can do with online commerce and connecting people and wikis and online collaboration, etc. etc., suddenly found this expression.

0:31So I think a lot of the reason the web exploded is that it kind of allowed and enabled all of these things that were in the works to suddenly try to find expression, kind of a dam bursting. CERN does physics, not computing. The down-bursting analogy is not entirely wrong, although there was a lot of work being done out there at large and certainly inside a physics laboratory.

1:11There was no way that we were going to get full-scale resource support for something that was totally accessory to the mainstream of what we were doing at CERN. So it had to get out. With a project like the web where nobody understands you because the only way to make people understand what it is about is to show it to them. to make them experience it and I said look this as I click here when I let go of the mouse pattern that page is coming from Hawaii and so he looked at this and I saw his eyes widen and I clicked another one and another page came up with another bunch of dinosaurs and then he pushed me aside and grabbed the mouse and began clicking himself when the web came out and you could just very easily with some

2:11very simple handwritten in the early days markup language html you could make a page and you could make put a picture on the page and make links to other pages and it was immediately a kind of a revelations If you wrote a web page and it adhered to the HTML standard, it could be read by anyone who had a browser that could read the HTML standard. And that meant that very quickly we had competing browsers, we had competing websites, we had an open ecosystem that anyone could join.

2:43The core question is, what is the value that defines the web? and my my belief is that the value is neutrality and I think the future of the web as this neutral platform will depend on the extent to which policy makers remain committed to that neutrality by resisting the dominance of market players who would compromise that we need to repair or complement or supplement the infrastructure so as to preserve the basic experience by content providers and users and application providers of this as a neutral platform that encourages innovation and creativity open to all in the 90s when everyone was looking for ways of sharing information the idea was it was all meant to be for the good it was to open up knowledge it was to enable communication between people across the world. Everything was all about what we could do for the good.

3:49That feels now as if it's turned on us. The big question is how do we protect ourselves from the bad things without losing all the good things? And this to me is why the web conference is so important. You have to look at it from many different angles, the economics and regulatory systems, the law, philosophy, politics. We need to be discussing how we take the web forward in such a way that it's good for humanity. Thank you. My name is Leila. I'm one of the two general co-chairs for the web conference 2019, which will take place in San Francisco from May 13 to 17.

4:52We are looking forward to welcoming you in San Francisco and Bay Area and to the web conference to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the web, but also to think about the future of the web as a more inclusive and balanced web. I'm Ricardo, I'm the other general co-chair of the conference, and to celebrate these 30 years of the web, we will not only have the classical research tracks, accessibility, big data, but also three special tracks that focus on health, the open web, and the relation of web and society. So, we hope to see you next May in San Francisco. Bye!

Source and licence

Recording: File:30th Anniversary of the Web The Web Conference 2019.webm by The Web Conference (2019-02-12), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 3.0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.