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He says he'd give the Web a B-plus, even an A-minus, that on balance it is a force for good. Yet an "accident of fate" has compromised its goodness. And that accident is intertwined with--perhaps, perversely, even caused by--his decision back in 1992 to take the road less traveled. The question that fascinates people who have heard of Berners-Lee--Why isn't he rich?--may turn out to have the same answer as the question that fascinates him: Why isn't the World Wide Web better than it is?
Berners-Lee comes by his vocation naturally. His parents helped design the world's first commercially available computer, the Ferranti Mark I. "The family level of excitement about mathematics was high," he says, recalling the breakfast-table teasing of his younger brother, then in primary school, who was having trouble fathoming the square root of negative four.
In adolescence Berners-Lee read science fiction, including Arthur C. Clarke's short story Dial F for Frankenstein. It is, he recalls, about "crossing the critical threshold of number of neurons," about "the point where enough computers get connected together" that the whole system "started to breathe, think, react autonomously." Could the World Wide Web actually realize Clarke's prophecy? No-- and yes. Berners-Lee warns against thinking of the Web as truly alive, as a literal global brain, but he does expect it to evince "emergent properties" that will transform society. Such as? Well, if he could tell you, they wouldn't be emergent, would they?
But making them as benign as possible is what gives his current job meaning. Even if the Web's most epic effects can't be anticipated or controlled, maybe they can be given some minimal degree of order. As director of the Web consortium, he brings together its members--Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, Apple, IBM and 155 others--and tries to broker agreement on technical standards even as the software underlying the Web rapidly evolves. His nightmare is a Web that "becomes more than one Web, so that you need 16 different browsers, depending on what you're looking at." He especially loathes those BEST VIEWED WITH ACME BROWSER signs on Websites.
Most of the consortium's achievements to date are, if important, arcane. (You probably don't care that HTML 3.2 is a widely respected standard, even though that fact greatly eases your travel on the Web.) But some are more high profile. pics, the Platform for Internet Content Selection, is a proposed standard that would let parents filter out offending Websites. It's a kind of V chip, except with no government involvement; you subscribe to the rating service of your choice.
It is for "random reasons" that Berners-Lee is known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, he says. "I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I happened to have the right combination of background." The place was CERN, the European physics laboratory that straddles the Swiss-French border, and he was there twice. The first time, in 1980, he had to master its labyrinthine information system in the course of a six-month consultancy. That was when he created his personal memory substitute, a program called Enquire. It allowed him to fill a document with words that, when clicked, would lead to other documents for elaboration.