The world wide web has more birthdays than the Queen. It feels like only last year that we were celebrating its 20th birthday. That’s because it was.
All the best institutions have multiple birthdays. My workplace has been celebrating its 600th anniversary for the past four years.
Incidentally, I work as a web designer and content editor. It goes without saying that the web is my livelihood. It feels like such a world away, when I first tentatively opened a wysiwyg webpage editor and created my first webpage. I felt so horribly out of my depth. Little was I to know that with a bit of practice it would begin to come so naturally.
For the web’s birthday, you can take your pick from any or all of the following:
- March 1989: Tim Berners-Lee submitted his initial proposal.
- October 1990: Tim Berners-Lee began work on the first web browser.
- 12 November 1990: A more fleshed-out proposal was written by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau.
- 6 August 1991: Web software was first made available.
- 30 April 1993: Cern declared that the web will be freely available to the world.
- October 1994: The World Wide Web Consortium was established.
Not that I’m complaining. The web is well worth celebrating.
Today marks the earliest opportunity to celebrate the web at 25. This is being used as an opportunity by Tim Berners-Lee to celebrate the success of the web, but also to warn about the threats to the web’s future and its principles.
It was put well by the Economist:
…the time since the proposal was submitted should be celebrated—the period in which the web’s father devoted himself to fostering its maturity, adoption and transformation. The web’s roots lie in the March 1989 paper, but its success came from continuous reinvention afterwards.
Of course, the web wouldn’t exist at all without the initial proposal. But what happened after that truly set the scene for what the web was to become.
Cern’s declaration that the web would be free for all to use — royalty-free — forever, solidified it as the democratising medium. It set the scene for the transformation in communication that we have all benefited from.
Anyone can access the, and anyone can add to it. We are all creators. And despite what some elitist commentators may have tried to suggest over the years, that is exactly the purpose of what Tim Berners-Lee proposed. The world wide web is the read/write web.
The universality of the web was underlined. That is why today web users can access it on a multitude of devices from desktop computers to mobile phones to fridges. And that is why web designers strive to make their content available on as many devices as possible.
If you benefit from using the web, it is only because of these principles of freedom that underpin it.
This nature of the web is what makes it so worth protecting. But the web is constantly under threat from negative forces that seek to make communication less democratic and less free.
Be it Facebook’s attempts to create a walled garden web, internet service providers blocking content or throttling bandwidth, or governments spying on internet usage, the principles that underpin the web are constantly being undermined.
The web is successful because it is free, and it must stay that way. We need to ensure that the barriers to entry remain low, and become lower in the developing world. We need to safeguard open web standards. And we need to make sure that people can be confident they can use the web freely and securely without being snooped on by their governments.
Tim Berners-Lee’s advice should be heeded. The web should be celebrated. But it’s more important that the web is protected.