Excerpts from:

Weaving the Web:
The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny
of the World Wide Web

by Its Inventor, Tim Berners-Lee

When I proposed the Web in 1989, the driving force I had in mind was communication through shared knowledge, and the driving 'market" for it was collaboration among people at work and at home. By building a hypertext Web, a group of people of whatever size could easily express themselves, quickly acquire and convey knowledge, overcome misunderstandings, and reduce duplication of effort. This would give people in a group a new power to build something together.

People would also have a running model of their plans and reasoning. A web of knowledge linked through hypertext would contain a snapshot of their shared understanding. When new people joined a group they would have the legacy of decisions and reasons available for inspection. When people left the group their work would already have been captured and integrated. As an exciting bonus, machine analysis of the web of knowledge could perhaps allow the participants to draw conclusions about management and organization of their collective activity that they would not otherwise have elucidated.

The intention was that the Web be used as a personal information system, and a group tool on all scales, from the team of two creating a flyer for the local elementary school play to the world population deciding on ecological issues.

I also wanted the Web to be used just as much "internally' as externally. Even though most of the first ten servers, like the one at CERN or SLAC, would be called intranet servers today, organizations and families are just beginning to see the power the Web can bring inside their walls. Although it takes a little work to set up the access control for a corporate or family intranet, once that has been done the Web's usefulness is accelerated, because the participants share a level of trust. This encourages more spontaneous and direct communication.

To be able to really work together on the Web, we need much better tools: better formats for presenting information to the user; more intuitive interfaces for editing and changing information; seamless integration of other tools, such as chat rooms, and audio- and videoconferencing, with Web editing. We need the ability to store on one server an annotation about a Web page on another; simple access controls for group membership, and for tracking changes to documents. While some of this work involves leading-edge research, a lot of it consists of trying to adapt existing computer systems to the global hypertext world.

For people to share knowledge, the Web must be a universal space across which all hypertext links can travel. I spend a good deal of my life defending this core property in one way or another.

Universality must exist along several dimensions. To start with, we must be able to interlink any documents-from drafts to highly polished works. Information is often lost within an organization when a "final document" of some kind is created at the end of an endeavor. Often, everything from the minutes of meetings to background research vanishes, and the reasoning that brought the group to its endpoint is lost. It might actually still exist on some disk somewhere, but it is effectively useless because the finished document doesn't link to it. What's more, different social and practical systems isolate documents of different levels from each other: We don't insert random notes into finished books, but why not, if they are relevant and insightful? At the consortium today, no one can mention a document in a meeting unless they can give a URI for it. Our policy is "If it isn't on the Web, it doesn't exist," and the cry often heard when a new idea is presented is "Stick it in Team Space!"-a directory for confidentially saving documents not otherwise on the Web. All mail is instantly archived to the Web with a persistent URI. It is already hard to imagine how it could have been any other way. The Web of work and play must be able to intertwine half-baked and fully baked ideas, and Web technology must support this.

Another dimension critical to universality is the ability to link local material to global. When an endeavor is put together that involves groups of different scales-whether a software engineering project such as mine at CERN, or an elementary school education project that is part of a town initiative and uses federal funds-information has to come from many levels and has to be cross-linked.

Similarly, universality must exist across the spectrum of cost and intention. People and organizations have different motivations for putting things on the Web: for their own benefit, commercial gain, the good of society, or whatever. For an information system to be universal, it can't discriminate between these. The Web must include information that is free, very expensive, and every level in between. It must allow all the different interest groups to put together all manner of pricing and licensing and incentive systems ... and always, of course, allow the user to "just say no."

The reason we need universality on all these levels is that that's how people operate in the real world. If the World Wide Web is to represent and support the web of life, it has to enable us to operate in different ways with different groups of different sizes and scopes at different places every day: our homes, offices, schools, churches, towns, states, countries, and cultures. It must also transcend levels, because creative people are always crossing boundaries. That is how we solve problems and innovate.

Information must be able to cross social boundaries, too. Our family life is influenced by work. Our existence in one group affects that in another. Values and actions are fed by all the ideas from these different areas. By connecting across groups, people also provide organization and consistency to the world. It is unusual for an individual to support environmental policies on a global level but then plan to dump chemicals into the local river.

My original vision for a universal Web was as an armchair aid to help people do things in the web of real life. It would be a mirror, reflecting reports or conversations or art and mapping social interactions. But more and more, the mirror model is wrong, because interaction is taking place primarily on the Web. People are using the Web to build things they have not built or written or drawn or communicated anywhere else. As the Web becomes a primary space for much activity, we have to be careful that it allows for a just and fair society. The Web must allow equal access to those in different economic and political situations; those who have physical or cognitive disabilities; those of different cultures; and those who use different languages with different characters that read in different directions across a page.

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Atoms each have a valence-an ability to connect with just so many other atoms. As an individual, each of us picks a few channels to be involved in, and we can cope with only so much. The advantage of getting things done faster on the Web is an advantage only to the extent that we can accept the information faster, and there are definite limits. By just pushing the amount we have to read and write, the number of e-mails we have to cope with, the number of Web sites we have to surf, we may scrape together a few more bytes of knowledge, but exhaust ourselves in the process and miss the point.

As a group works together, the members begin to reach common understandings that involve new concepts, which only they share. Sometimes these concepts can become so strong that the group finds it has to battle the rest of the world to explain its decisions. At this point, the members may realize for the first time that they have started using words in special ways. They may not realize how they have formed a little subculture until they begin explaining their decisions to colleagues outside the group. They have built a new understanding, and at the same time built a barrier around themselves. Boundaries of understanding have been broken, but new ones have formed around those who share the new concept.

A choice has been made, and there is a gain and a loss in terms of shared understanding.

What should guide us when we make these choices? What kind of a structure are we aiming for, and what principles will help us achieve it? The Web as a medium is so flexible that it leaves the choice to us. As well as the choice of links we make individually, we have a choice in the social machines we create, the variously shaped parts in our construction game. We know that we want a well-connected structure for group intuition to work. We know it should be decentralized, to be resilient and fair. The human brain outperforms computers by its incredible level of Parallel Processing. Society, similarly, solves its problems in parallel. For the society to work efficiently on the Web, massive parallelism is required. Everybody must be able to publish, and to control who has access to their published work. There should not be a structure (like a highway system or mandatory Dewey decimal system) or limitation that precludes any kind of idea or solution purely because the Web won't allow it to be explained.

The Internet before the Web thrived on a decentralized technical architecture and a decentralized social architecture. These were incrementally created by the design of technical and social machinery. The community had just enough rules of behavior to function using the simple social machines it invented. Starting from a flat world in which every computer had just one Internet address and everyone was considered equal, over time the sea of chattering people imposed some order on itself. Newsgroups gave structure to information and people. The Web started with a similar lack of preset structure, but soon all sorts of lists of "best" sites created a competition-based structure even before advertising was introduced. While the Internet itself seemed to represent a flight from hierarchy, without hierarchy there were too many degrees of separation to prevent things from being reinvented. There seemed to be a quest for something that was not a tree, but not a flat space, either.

We certainly need a structure that will avoid those two catastrophes: the global uniform McDonald's monoculture, and the isolated Heaven's Gate cults that understand only themselves. By each of us spreading our attention evenly between groups of different size, from personal to global, we help avoid these extremes. Link by link we build paths of understanding across the web of humanity. We are the threads holding the world together. As we do this, we naturally end up with a few Web sites in very high demand, and a continuum down to the huge number of Web sites with only rare visitors. In other words, appealing though equality between peers seems, such a structure by its uniformity is not optimal. It does not pay sufficient attention to global coordination, and it can require too many clicks to get from problem to solution.

If instead everyone divides their time more or less evenly between the top ten Web sites, the rest of the top one hundred, the rest of the top one thousand, and so on, the load on various servers would have a distribution of sizes characteristic of "fractal" patterns so common in nature (from coastlines to ferns) and of the famous "Mandelbrot set" mathematical patterns. It turns out that some measurements of all the Web traffic by Digital Equipment employees on the West Coast revealed very closely this l/n law: The Web exhibits fractal properties even though we can't individually see the patterns, and even though there is no hierarchical system to enforce such a distribution.

This doesn't answer the question, but it is intriguing because it suggests that there are large-scale dynamics operating to produce such results. A fascinating result was found by Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University who discovered that, when the matrix of the Web is analyzed like a quantum mechanical system, stable energy states correspond to concepts under discussion. The Web is starting to develop large-scale structure in its own way. Maybe we will be able to produce new metrics for checking the progress of society toward what we consider acceptable.

The analogy of a global brain is tempting, because Web and brain both involve huge numbers of elements -neurons and Web pages and a mixture of structure and apparent randomness. However, a brain has an intelligence that emerges on quite a different level from anything that a neuron could be aware of. From Arthur C. Clarke to Douglas Hofstader, writers have contemplated an "emergent property" arising from the mass of humanity and computers. But remember that such a phenomenon would have its own agenda. We would not as individuals be aware of it, let alone control it, any more than the neuron controls the brain.

I expect that there will be emergent properties with the Semantic Web, but at a lesser level than emergent intelligence. There could be spontaneous order or instability: Society could crash, much as the stock market crashed in October 1987 because of automatic trading by computer. The agenda of trading—to make money on each trade--didn't change, but the dynamics did; so many huge blocks of shares were traded so fast that the whole system became unstable.

To ensure stability, any complex electronic system needs a damping mechanism to introduce delay, to prevent it from oscillating too wildly. Damping mechanisms have since been built into the stock-trading system. We may be able to build them into the Semantic Web of cooperating computers—but will we be able to build them into the web of cooperating people? Already the attention of people, the following of links, and the flow of money are interlaced inextricably.

I do not, therefore, pin my hopes on an overpowering order emerging spontaneously from, the chaos. I feel that to deliberately build a society, incrementally, using the best ideas we have, is our duty and will also be the most fun. We are slowly learning the value of decentralized, diverse systems, and of mutual respect and tolerance. Whether you put it down to evolution or your favorite spirit, the neat thing is that we seem as humans to be tuned so that we do in the end get the most fun out of doing the "right" thing.

My hope and faith that we are headed somewhere stem in part from the repeatedly proven observation that people seem to be naturally built to interact with others as part of a greater system. A person who's completely turned inward, who spends all his or her time alone, is someone who has trouble making balanced decisions and is very unhappy. Someone who is completely turned outward, who's worried about the environment and international diplomacy and spends no time sitting at home or in his local community, also has trouble making balanced decisions and is also very unhappy. It seems a person's happiness depends on having a balance of connections at different levels. We seem to have built into us what it takes in a person to be part of a fractal society.

If we end up producing a structure in hyperspace that allows us to work together harmoniously, that would be a metamorphosis. Though it would, I hope, happen incrementally, it would result in a huge restructuring of society. A society that could advance with intercreativity and group intuition rather than conflict as the basic mechanism would be a major change.

If we lay the groundwork right and try novel ways of interacting on the new Web, we may find a whole new set of financial, ethical, cultural, and governing structures to which we can choose to belong, rather than having to pick the ones we happen to physically live in. Bit by bit those structures that work best would become more important in the world, and democratic systems might take on different shapes.

Working together is the business of finding shared understandings but being careful not to label them as absolute. They may be shared, but often arbitrary in the larger picture.

We spend a lot of time trying to tie down meanings and fighting to have our own framework adopted by others. It is, after all, a lifelong process to set ourselves up with connections to all the concepts we use. Having to work with someone else's definitions is difficult. An awe-inspiring talent of my physics tutor, Professor John Moffat, was that when I brought him a problem I had worked out incorrectly, using a strange technique and symbols different from the well-established ones, he not only would follow my weird reasoning to find out where it went wrong, but would then use my own strange notation to explain the right answer. This great feat involved looking at the world using my definitions, comparing them with his, and translating his knowledge and experience into my language. It was a mathematical version of the art of listening. This sort of effort is needed whenever groups meet. It is also the hard work of the consortium's working groups. Though it often seems to be no fun, it is the thing that deserves the glory.

We have to be prepared to find that the "absolute"' truth we had been so comfortable with within one group is suddenly challenged when we meet another. Human communication scales up only if we can be tolerant of the differences while we work with partial understanding.

The new Web must allow me to learn by crossing boundaries. It has to help me reorganize the links in my own brain so I can understand those in another person's. It has to enable me to keep the frameworks I already have, and relate them to new ones. Meanwhile, we as people will have to get used to viewing as communication rather than argument the discussions and challenges that are a necessary part of this process. When we fail, we will have to figure out whether one framework or another is broken, or whether we just aren't smart enough yet to relate them.

The parallels between technical design and social principles have recurred throughout the Web's history. About a year after I arrived to start the consortium, my wife and I came across Unitarian Universalism. Walking into a Unitarian Universalist church more or less by chance felt like a breath of fresh air. Some of the association's basic philosophies very much match what I had been brought up to believe, and the objective I had in creating the Web. People now sometimes even ask whether I designed the Web based on these principles. Clearly, Unitarian Universalism had no influence on the Web. But I can see how it could have, because I did indeed design the Web around universalist (with a lowercase u) principles.

One of the things I like about Unitarianism is its lack of religious trappings, miracles, and pomp and circumstance. It is minimalist, in a way. Unitarians accepted the useful parts of philosophy from all religions, including Christianity and Judaism, but also Hinduism, Buddhism, and any other good philosophies, and wrapped them not into one consistent religion, but into an environment in which people think and discuss, argue, and always try to be accepting of differences of opinion and ideas.

I suppose many people would not classify "U-Uism" as a religion at all, in that it doesn't have the dogma, and is very tolerant of different forms of belief. It passes the Test of Independent Invention that I apply to technical designs: If someone else had invented the same thing independently, the two systems should work together without anyone having to decide which one was "central." For me, who enjoyed the acceptance and the diverse community of the Internet, the Unitarian church was a great fit. Peer-to-peer relationships are encouraged wherever they are appropriate, very much as the World Wide Web encourages a hypertext link to be made wherever it is appropriate. Both are philosophies that allow decentralized systems to develop, whether they are systems of computers, knowledge, or people. The people who built the Internet and Web have a real appreciation of the value of individuals and the value of systems in which individuals play their role, with both a firm sense of their own identity and a firm sense of some common good.

There's a freedom about the Internet: As long as we accept the rules of sending packets around, we can send packets containing anything to anywhere. In Unitarian Universalism, if one accepts the basic tenet of mutual respect in working together toward some greater vision, then one finds a huge freedom in choosing one's own words that capture that vision, one's own rituals to help focus the mind, one's own metaphors for faith and hope.

I was very lucky, in working at CERN, to be in an environment that Unitarian Universalists and physicists would equally appreciate: one of mutual respect, and of building something very great through collective effort that was well beyond the means of any one person-without a huge bureaucratic regime. The environment was complex and rich; any two people could get together and exchange views, and even end up working together somehow. This system produced a weird and wonderful machine, which needed care to maintain, but could take advantage of the ingenuity, inspiration, and intuition of individuals in a special way. That, from the start, has been my goal for the World Wide Web.

Hope in life comes from the interconnections among all the people in the world. We believe that if we all work for what we think individually is good, then we as a whole will achieve more power, more understanding, more harmony as we continue the journey. We don't find the individual being subjugated by the whole. We don't find the needs of the whole being subjugated by the increasing power of an individual. But we might see more understanding in the struggles between these extremes. We don't expect the system to eventually become perfect. But we feel better and better about it. We find the journey more and more exciting, but we don't expect it to end.

Should we then feel that we are getting smarter and smarter, more and more in control of nature, as we evolve? Not really. Just better connected—connected into a better shape. The experience of seeing the Web take off by the grassroots effort of thousands gives me tremendous hope that if we have the individual will, we can collectively make of our world what we want.