Two Webs don’t make a right: Berners-Lee

The internet needs to remain as one single structure, accessible from all kinds of devices by all kinds of people to remain useful says father of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

In a keynote address to the United Nations’ Internet Governance Forum in Egypt, Berners-Lee said that a core principle in the development of the World Wide Web was universality, and that this was key to its continuing success.

“It's worth remembering that the thing that made the Web work then, the most important thing about it still today is universality. The core value that it is one universal space. Two Webs don't work. It has to be one Web,” he said.

“It has to be one Web for all sorts of information, not just polished information, crummy information, ideas people have just had. It has to be one Web no matter what hardware you have, no matter where you buy your computer from.

“And now more importantly, what sort of device you have, whether you have something like this [indicating a smartphone] or something like a laptop.”

He also said that the view of what the Web was had shifted from a bunch of connected computers or web pages, to a concept of “humanity connected” as a part of a kind of social network.

Berners-Lee also took the opportunity to officially open the World Wide Web Foundation, that will develop ways in which the Web can be made available to all members of society, by sending a message onto the internet via social networking site Twitter, as what he referred to as a “time-honoured tradition”.

Another Internet luminary, and one of the developers of the TCP/IP protocol, Vint Cerf, has also recently spoken about how the Web should be used, more specifically about net neutrality in the United States.

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