Weaving the Web
Okay, I think this time I’m finally going to start a blog. I’ve held off now, for years– I first toyed with a blog-like format for my personal web page in 1999, before the term “blog” was in common use. But I’ve never really wanted to commit to regular updates; in fact, I still don’t. What I do want is a place to put my thoughts as I develop them, and a repository to organize what I learn on a regular basis. Finally blogging software has gotten good enough to do this easily, and make the results into a reasonable web site.
Last week I read Weaving the Web, by Tim Berners-Lee. Tim Berners-Lee, of course, is the man who invented the world wide web.
As a programmer, I found the book incredibly inspiring. As reported by Berners-Lee, the first practical web application was actually an organizational phone directory for CERN! Berners-Lee saw that he could solve this problem– and others– with special-purpose code; but he also realized that by writing general-purpose code, using hypertext in a distributed, networked way, he could solve a much more general set of problems. This, of course, is what good programmers do every day, but it’s inspiring to realize that with a little bit of luck and a lot of persistence, you can take that programmer instinct and use it to change the world.
There was nothing revolutionary about either distributed applications or hypertext. The most interesting part of the “invention” was the URL– nobody had ever created a protocol-independent addressing scheme before. But once implemented and promoted, the concept of distributed global hypertext took the world by storm.
Although I don’t imagine I’ll be the next Berners-Lee, one thing I’ll be using this blog for is to explore some of my own ideas for generalization and distribution in computing. Blogs are, of course, one of many consequences of the web’s invention that I’m sure Tim Berners-Lee never envisioned. There are many others (some of which are mentioned in the book) which have not yet been realized. This is an exciting time to be involved with web programming, since the work we do can still change people’s lives.
I’m sure I’ll also post other things from time to time: the requisite goofy pictures of my kids, bitches about work, esoteric technical crap, and all of the other stuff we know and love in blogs. (Actually, I shouldn’t say I’m sure, since the most recent goofy pictures of my kids on the web are over two years old! Gotta do something about that soon).
Anyway, hello, whoever you are. Welcome to my blog.
