Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

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.

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

The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

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

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect - to help people work together - and not as a technical toy.

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

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

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 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.

I invented the web just because I needed it really because it was so frustrating that it didn't exit.

When you understand things, there's no more magic.

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.

To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.

The internet explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that's put there for one reason and realise they can connect it with something else.

Acceptance is the spiritual hammock.

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

You affect the world by what you browse.

When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.

If different cultures connect with each other, they are less likely to want to shoot each other.

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

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

The search button on the browser no longer provides an objective search, but a commercial one.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Freedom of connection with any application to any party is the fundamental social basis of the internet. And now, is the basis of the society built on the internet.

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

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.

I don't believe in the sort of "Eureka!" moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.

It was never clear that it wouldn't just stop (the WWW). Any time during that exponential growth, it could have stalled. I think we were never very confident until 1993.

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

When somebody has learned how to program a computer ... You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the whole cat and mouse game between the readers and writers that makes the web work.

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

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.

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.

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

You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.

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

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

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