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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Man struggles with man and technology, in that order, 6 April 2000
By A Customer
Tim Berners-Lee ("TBL") has a story to tell rather than a web to weave. Readers looking for a deep technical account of how the web was built will be thoroughly disappointed as TBL writes in crystal clear colloquial english about his personal venture to bring people together to exchange information. In the process he tells us about the merits of unsung heroes and technologies. Readers seeking an autobiography would also better look elsewhere as TBL has no need for hagiographies.TBL's story is nearly apologetic and devoid of any need to project an image. "Weaving the Web" tells the story of a team contributing to one of the last Millennium's major technological milestones. TBL introduces readers to the many who have graciously and silently contributed to the genesis of the web, most notably Robert Cailliau. They all have in common a desire to contribute to a worldwide effort aimed at making knowledge from all by all available to all. This necessitated the creation of today's key www components, HTML, URL and FTP/TCP IP enabling all internet users to create, find and call up documents or web sites. In the process of that creation, TBL tells us about the eternal human saga of reconciling opposing camps which seem sometimes more concerned about holding on to their acquired albeit flawed knowledge franchise rather than advancing the search for the new and the better. Piously, TBL explains how the web was born out of a desire to facilitate CERN physicists' access to knowledge residing in the entrails of a disparate collection of operating systems. CERN itself seems to have financed this development nearly despite itself, as TBL humbly admits. However, to its credit and those of the European taxpayers, CERN famously made all the IP created in this process freely available to the world's citizens. Who was that CIA director famously writing in the Wall Street Journal (Mar 2000) that most of Europe's technology was not worthwhile to steal? Where would the NASDAQ have been without the dot.com revolution? However pious he may be, TBL is neither a man to gladly suffer attempts to be swept under the carpet. Dryly, he describes the Transatlantic gusto for turning promising "open" technology into immediate money spinners which will only benefit "the few" and illustrates this with the NCSA's attempts to claim paternity rights over the web and the proprietary implementation of browsing technology by Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (later Netscape). Throughout his venture, we see TBL encounter or write about the protagonists of the "open software" movement since brought into the limelight by LINUX, Young's "Under the Radar" and Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". Somewhat repetitively, TBL enthuses about the possible avenues for the web and, less provocatively than Bill Gates in "The Road Ahead", shares with us his vision for the future. As life would have it, nature mimmicks the story of the nascent web and TBL, the "modern man", tells us nearly incidentally how in the process of weaving the web he came to rock the cradle of his newly born ones- a far cry from the heroic biographies written about those macho daredevil pioneers. In the book's introduction, TBL writes he had a story to tell, a record to set straight. I would venture to say he has done more than that. The continued use and growth of the web will be the major legacy of TBL and his fellow pilgrim surfers, whereas the book will be a reminder to Berners-Lee's children that their father was a talented anti-hero of whom they can, rightly, think proudly.
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