Top 100 Tim Berners-Lee Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

52. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

53. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

55. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

56. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

57. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

58. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

61. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

62. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

64. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

66. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

68. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

70. “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?””

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

72. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

74. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

75. “The story of the growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. The Web’s ability to allow people to forge links is why we refer to it as an abstract information space, rather than simply a network.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

76. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

77. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

79. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

81. “I’m an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

84. “I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

85. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

86. “Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

87. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

89. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

90. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

91. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

92. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

94. “I would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. That meant as close as possible to no rules at all.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

95. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

98. “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.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

99. “E-mail allowed messages to be sent from one person to another, but did not form a space in which information could permanently exists and be referred to.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

100. “I found myself answering the same questions asked frequently of me by different people. It would be so much easier if everyone could just read my database.”

— Tim Berners-Lee