The recent lecture ‘The future of the World Wide Web’ by Professor Tim Berners-Lee is available online, in two sizes of RealMedia video. Worth seeing, or just listening to. The first part is on the history and basic concepts of the web, and the second part is on ‘The Semantic Web’ and RDF’s role.
I’m very optimistic about the Web now. A few years ago things looked bleak: Flash, Microsoft ‘standards’, visual style crushing useability. Boo.com syndrome. Things are moving back to the real point now - content, hyperlinks, semantic markup, and best of all, useability. Concepts like xHTML/CSS, Wiki webs and RESTful design are seen as the new ‘cool’ technologies, but are really a return to the Web’s first principles. Tim Berners-Lee isn’t just the creator of The Web, he’s one of the main reasons it survived the bad years, thanks to his work with the W3C.
Link: The future of the World Wide Web His slides are available too.
[Nick Hinder - if you are reading this, he pronounces GIF as “jiff”, so you’re in good company]
