Tim Berner Lee - The man behind the World Wide Web

 

Tim Berners Lee

Biography

A graduate of Oxford University, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
He is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence ( CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He is also a Professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK.
He is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He was a Director of the Web Science Trust (WST) launched in 2009 to promote research and education in Web Science, the multidisciplinary study of humanity connected by technology.
Tim is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
He has promoted open government data globally, is a member of the UK's Transparency Board, and president of London's Open Data Institute.
In 2001 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany's Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. In 2009 he was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of "Weaving the Web".
On March 18 2013, Tim, along with Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreesen, was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for "ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity."



(Longer biography)

Before you mail me

• If you need someone to find something for you about some arbitrary subject (travel agents, or parakeets or whatever), don't ask me, but try the Virtual Library for example, or your favorite search engine.
• If you want to know how to run a server, or how to edit HTML, check the W3C web or your local bookstore. I'm sorry I can't answer individual requests for help.
• If you can't access something on www.w3.org , you find bad links from www.w3.org pages, or errors in the hypertext please see the webmaster's documentation..
• If you are doing homework or a school project on the history of the Web then please check my Kid's questions, or the more general Frequently Asked Questions; and also, W3C FAQ, or my press FAQ as almost everything I have is there or linked from this page. I am sorry I cannot help with individual projects.
• If you are a member of the press and need clarification or an interview, please mail w3t-pr@w3.org (and Cc me) with details.
• If it is about a possible speaking engagement, see below.

If you have a serious comment on things I have signed, then do email me. I am also always open to discussion with W3C Advisory Committee representatives.

What not to email

Email is safe unless it contains programs. (Data and documents are fine, programs are not). If you send me a program, I will not run it, as it could damage my system and could be a virus.

• Note: Documents for Microsoft word, Excel, and possibly other Office programs tend to execute programs (scripts) in what you would expect to be harmless documents. These can expose my machine to viruses, because these programs do not (it seems) prevent scripts from running within a document when it received by email. Please do not send me Microsoft Office documents.
• If you are sending text, please send it as plain text, HTML, of necessary PDF. If you use your favorite word process, slide tool, etc, and send it in that program's format, then you are forcing me install proprietary software on whatever machine I read them on.

What you can email

• These are all good document standards: Plain text messages, HTML (sometimes called rich text) pages without scripts, Photos (JPEG files, PNG, GIF and SVG), PDF, SMIL, RDF/XML, N3 and so on. All these can be sent as messages or as attachments to messages. I can read them with a variety of software programs, and they cannot contain viruses, unless there is a serious bug in the code I use to read them. If you don't need anything else, then use plain text.

These are good rules when emailing anyone.
Please use my full name in the "To" line with my email address, as this will make your message look less like spam. This will happen automatically if you have me in your address book. If you just type in my email address, I probably won't see your mail.

Source: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/