183 Quotes by Tim Berners-Lee

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.

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.

Anyone who slaps a “this page is best viewed with Browser X” label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.

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.

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.

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.

The world’s urban poor and the illiterate are going to be increasingly disadvantaged and are in danger of being left behind. The web has added a new dimension to the gap between the first world and the developing world. We have to start talking about a human right to connect.

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.

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