Tim Berners-Lee’s name will be familiar to most readers of Physics World as the one-time Oxford physics student who, while working at the CERN particle-physics lab in Geneva, invented the World Wide Web – a feat for which he has received numerous awards, including an OBE in 1997.

Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of the Web in 1989, as a way of helping CERN’s large physics collaborations to organize their documentation, which was until then stored in disparate formats on incompatible computers spread around the world. From the outset, however, Berners-Lee’s personal goals for the project were far more ambitious. While the original proposal sat in administrative limbo, Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau nevertheless began working on the project under the guise of experimenting with the development environment under the then newly released NEXTSTEP operating system. After a few months’ work, they had invented the crucial ingredients of the Web, namely the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and hypertext mark-up language (HTML), and soon had the world’s first Web browser and Web server running on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer.

Berners-Lee and Cailliau then began a concerted effort to introduce the Web to as many groups of people as possible. Although progress was slow at first, the Web began to grow explosively after Mark Andreesen and his colleagues at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois created the Mosaic browser that could display not only text but also graphics and interactive forms.

Once the Web did take off, Berners-Lee moved from being the Web’s chief evangelist to being its moral leader. While others were beginning to reap huge rewards from the commercialization of the Web, Berners-Lee steadfastly worked to ensure that it remained as one unified whole rather than being pulled in disparate directions by the many forces trying to “extend” it to their advantage.

In 1994 he moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international group of businesses and academic institutes charged with developing new standards and technologies for the Web. Although it seemed to many that the control of the Web had moved into the hands of corporations such as Microsoft and AOL, the consistently thorough and unbiased work of the W3C has, over time, convinced even the most competitive companies that it is in everyone’s best interest to develop standards co-operatively – as otherwise there may be no Web left to fight over.

Despite the many more lucrative opportunities that must certainly have been open to him, Berners-Lee has remained the director of the W3C, as it is here that he believes he has the best chance to influence the continued development of his brainchild. Examples of the projects he has been involved with at the W3C include PICS, a system that gives parents flexible control over Web content without the need for government intervention or censorship, and the Web accessibility guidelines, which explain to authors how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities.

In Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee describes the thought processes that led to the invention of the Web, the history of the Web from his perspective, and the surprisingly difficult job of persuading early audiences of the utility of the project. (The first paper describing the Web was rejected by the annual Hypertext conference for, among other things, “violating the architectural principles that hypertext systems had worked on up till then”.) The book also gives interesting insights into the mind of the inventor of the Web, and his attitude to those who have the tendency to judge someone’s worth by how much money they make. One can only imagine his indignity at being asked by one American TV reporter: “So you actually invented the Web. Tell us, exactly how rich are you?”

Those of us who have worked with Berners-Lee know that his infectious enthusiasm and genuine commitment to integrity have been a major force in moulding the Web into what it is today. Unfortunately the sense of excitement surrounding the early days of the Web does not come across clearly in this book. For example, the book describes how the number of hits on the first Web server at CERN increased exponentially month after month, but it fails to put across the sense of amazement these numbers conveyed to those involved in the early days of the project. Since the explosive growth of the Web was the result of so many people working in parallel, perhaps no one person’s story can capture this exhilaration, even if that person is the inventor of the Web.

The final third of the book is more interesting, dealing instead with Berners-Lee’s hopes and dreams for the future of the Web. Despite its enormous impact during the last decade, it is clear that Berners-Lee is not entirely satisfied with the way the Web has developed so far. His original goal for the Web was that it should be used as a worldwide collaborative tool. The idea was that groups of any size would use the Web collaboratively to document ideas, while at the same time keeping a record of the discussion and reasoning that went into shaping the final document. In much the same way that the Web was invented by combining the previously disjoint worlds of the Internet and hypertext, Berners-Lee’s hope is that the Web itself will be a tool that will help to bring disjointed ideas together.

The book also describes the way that the W3C has developed XML, a document-description language that is similar to, but more flexible than, HTML. Through the increased use of XML, the consortium hopes that the semantic information currently lost when documents and databases are converted to HTML will be preserved on the Web. In this way it is hoped that computers themselves will be able to read and “understand” the Web.

Unfortunately, in the limited space devoted to these plans for the future, there is little room left for anything but a cursory discussion of the details behind these ideas. Thus it is difficult to distinguish the author’s science-fiction-like dreams of intelligent computers that can browse the Web and make logical deductions from what they find there, from his other ideas that may actually be achievable in the near future. But to sceptics Berners-Lee points out that few people believed in his last dream when they first heard about it either, a point that is hard to argue with.

In conclusion, this book will be of value to those already interested in the history of the Web, in the thought processes that led to it, and in the plans for the future of the man who led the way. For those with a more general interest in the Internet, the Web and e-life in general, there are many other books with more general appeal.