Quotes By Tim Berners Lee

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.

We can't blame the technology when we make mistakes.

We could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically. To do that, we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.

What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do.

I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books.

I should be able to pick which applications I use for managing my life, I should be able to pick which content I look at, and I should be able to pick which device I use, which company I use for supplying my internet, and I'd like those to be independent choices.

Customers need to be given control of their own data-not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them.

If you are not on the web, you will have problems accessing services.

The important thing is the diversity available on the Web.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing.

The Google algorithm was a significant development. I've had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.

It's amazing how quickly people on the internet can pick something up, but it's also amazing how quickly they can drop it.

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached.

One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet... obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.

I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways. So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.

Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. Most organizations are missing this ability to connect all the data together.

I think IT projects are about supporting social systems-about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.

In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted.

The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way-not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures. The U.S. should demonstrate that it is prepared to share control with the world.

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.

Things can change so fast on the internet.

It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn't even have words like click and jump and page.

There was a time when people felt the internet was another world, but now people realise it's a tool that we use in this world.

I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years.

The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things.

In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it.