Tim Berners-Lee Announces World Wide Web Foundation
On 14th September 2008, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, announced the formation of the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF).
The World Wide Web Foundation seeks:
- to advance One Web that is free and open,
- to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,
- and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.
The Web Foundation is bringing together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale. By funding research, technology development, and outreach, the Web Foundation strives to enable all people to share knowledge, access services, conduct commerce, participate in good governance, and communicate in creative ways.
Apologies for the massive copy-and-paste, but I felt that the WWWF website could better explain their intention than I could.
I understand the purpose of the WWWF, however I feel that the approach being used to tackle the complex issues is rather outdated and inefficient. It appears that the structute of the WWWF is to receive contributions from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). From experience of working with HTML and CSS in my day-to-day job, it can take the W3C years to produce guidelines and standards for programming languages. If the same fate is to fall on the WWWF I can’t help but feel it has already failed before it’s started.
The World Wide Web and the technologies that are being used are being developed at an unprecedented rate; a rate that has never been seen for web technology before, you only have to look at the development of the web browsers and JavaScript in recent months. Relying upon the WWWF with the W3C and WSRI to guide the development will only slow the process and potentially harm the organic development of the internet.
Consortiums, forums, commitees no longer work when discussing important issues regarding the development and future of the internet. They aren’t transparent enough and don’t progress as fast as the internet does. My personal feelings are to let the internet develop organically instead of trying to steer it in a direction that is more commercially viable.