Despite being the frontrunner, Tim Berners-Lee is admirably modest.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Who is the greatest living Englishman? It would be hard to argue against the merits of Tim Berners-Lee, the sole begetter and inventor of the world wide web, an organism whose initials, www, have (in some languages, including our own) three times more syllables than the phrase they’re abbreviating, which is perhaps the only flaw in Berners-Lee’s grand design.
The story of how he devised the hypertext transfer protocol (http) and the entire language and structure of the web on a Steve Jobs NeXt computer at Cern in Switzerland in 1990 has passed into legend, though I would certainly recommend reading his own excellent and highly readable account, Weaving The Web. Sir Tim remains an idealist, passionately committed to an open, free and wholly public web as he guides the W3 Consortium towards an unknown future from his base at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Incidentally, that flaw… the unwieldy name and initials, www, came about as a result of the inventor’s extraordinary and entirely endearing modesty. Originally he had come up with the name The Information Mine, but he found the initials, TIM, embarrassing. No less egocentric (especially in French-speaking Switzerland, where he was working) was another thought, the Mine Of Information, so he settled on good old www.
I had the privilege of meeting the great man recently and he showed me the browser equivalent he is working on at MIT for the new Semantic Web (another time, another article perhaps) – an application called The Tabulator. He had failed to notice that his full initials feature prominently in TaBuLator and it was perhaps wrong of me to point it out, but the squirms of self-deprecation were marvellous to watch. This is a man who could have taken a hundredth of a cent for every commercial transaction for just five years and been rich beyond computation, he could have linked himself with corporations, put his name about in public, branded himself and offered his opinions on everything and everyone. Instead, he chooses quietly to work on ways to ensure a future web of even greater openness and neutrality in scientific, intellectual and political exchange. He is what my grandfather would have called a real mensch.
I remember trying to persuade the then deputy director general of the BBC, John Birt, that the BBC should get hold of the domain bbc.com for web and email purposes. He had no idea, and I don’t blame him, what I was talking about. This was about 1993 and only sad acts like me had heard of the internet. About six months later, however, it was too late and bbc.com had been snapped up by a cable-winding company somewhere and so the ill-fated beeb.com and the good old bbc.co.uk were acquired. Actually, bbc.com now redirects one’s browser to the mother page (how much did the corporation have to pay for that, one wonders?) which brings me to the gripe with which I will leave you.
How come we British are just about the only nation on earth who have to make the tedious and entirely unnecessary three extra keystrokes every time we type a URL? I could be stephen.fr in France, stephen.za in South Africa, stephen.ru in Russia, stephen.nl in Holland, etc, etc, but here? Oh no, it’s stephen dot co dot bloody uk. How annoying is that?
All right, not very in the great scheme of things, but nonetheless, who was responsible for getting us trapped into it? Did they think the nation was getting an extra fancy couple of initials which would lend a commercial gravitas that might be equivalent to America’s .com? Well, they were deluding themselves if that’s what they believed. All they got was the puzzled contempt of other nations. Let’s fight for a pure .uk, I say. The BBC can lead the way by becoming bbc.com now that they’ve finally bought the domain.
This could be the campaign that finally unites our apparently fractured and broken society. Hurrah.uk letitbeso.uk.
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptI remember trying to persuade the then deputy director general of the BBC, John Birt, that the BBC should get hold of the domain bbc.com for web and email purposes. He had no idea, and I don’t blame him, what I was talking about. … [...]
Maybe someone thought “uk” looked too much like “ugh”?
I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for the co.uk (which by now probably has become utterly obsolete) but it’s so wonderfully eccentric that I would regret seeing it vanish!
Nominet handle the .uk TLD, and they have seen fit to create a whole load of sub-domains for us webby Brits to use. It is illegal to register something.uk, you have to use one of the sub-domains. Which is a bit rubbish. There is logic to it, though. .co.uk is a commercial website, .gov..uk Government, etc. etc.
Personally, I went to Guernsey for my domain. The nice man who manages them there (seemingly from a garden shed) allowed me to have a straight .gg. I only wanted it because they are my initials. Unusual domains are good, but you have to explain to everyone, as they always try and add a rogue .com or .co.uk on the end, the digital philistines!
Tim Berners-Lee’s decision not to make money from his invention looks positively saintly, when compared with the organizations who are scrambling to patent DNA molecules. If I understand it aright, (and please feel free to contradict me if I’m wrong and I promise not to go postal, as sometimes happens in these online debates) there is the possibility, down the road, of having to pay royalties for catching a disease. Not to mention the fact that, according to Michael Crichton, in a NYT Op Ed last February (“Patenting Life”), gene patents are being used to “halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor.”
Up until a few years ago, as a private person in Sweden you could only register domainname.pp.se, where pp stood for ‘private person’.
So, i have always believed that .co.uk stand for corporation.uk, as org.uk stands for organisation.uk. Simply; the people in charge of the domain registration in the uk haven’t release the .uk addresses yet.
Doesn’t Australia uses .com.au?
Stephen, there are reasons why it’s “.co.uk” rather than just “.uk” (or “.gb” as it should have been).
Wikipedia has a good article explaining the history, so I won’t repeat it here myself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk
Our domain name system shows some forethought, that was in fact intended for the rest of the domain system, the problem is simply that is was never really followed through.
The issue at hand is both availability, and authorityâ€â€for example how are we to know if met.uk is in fact the official Metropolitan Police site? On the other hand if we stipulate that only endorsed entities can register under a police.uk second-level domain (thus resulting in met.police.uk) we immediately reveal the authority without having to mess about with server certificates (providing the domain issuing authority can be trusted of course). But we can’t anticipate every single one we might want in future, so they’ve been reserved for future use (with some exceptions).
Unfortunately it took years for .me.uk to be introduced for personal domains, and few companies advertise .ltd.uk or .plc.uk. Who know if ones like .birthplace.uk, .birthyear.uk, .band.uk or anyone of a million others might be introduced. Arguably not having canonicalisation (hierarchical categories) in the system is short sighted. What would we do when everyone and everything has a domain that’s just too long to be read out because there’s no relevant way to separate similarly named people and things apart?
Incidentally we also have the .gb top-level domain, only it’s not used for political reasons.
According to The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/05/bbc_domain/) the BBC bought bbc.com from Boston Business Computing, Limited for $375,000.
Tim BL is a top man but the the W3C which he runs is a rather strange organisation. This unassuming man has an absolute veto over all standards (strictly, recommendations) published by the Consortium.
He appears to be a man of great integrity. He does not claim to to be an idealist. You might, perhaps, be doing him a disservice in labelling him as one.
Quite typical of the BBC, of course. But looking back at what some Internet pages looked like over the years is truly comical – for example, the BBC’s Election 97 page was truly incomplete without some frames, and a few furiously spinning animated GIFs.
It’s still there, on the Internet Archive. If I’m right, the present system by which pages were created was only launched to coincide with the launch of BBC News 24 in late 1997.
Being American, and having every website I want to use ends in .com, I am afraid I only have one response to this post: I’ve always heard that Alan Moore was the Greatest Living Englishman, and I think I’m going to stick with that. Because what’s the World Wide Web compared to Watchmen? (::said in an accusing tone::)
Interestingly, TBL has commented that one of the biggest mistakes was getting the ordering of domains “wrong”. They should really be the other way round, with the largest granularity at the front, e.g. com.stephenfry, so that you are consistently descending in scale from left to right. In the system we have, you do a sort of climb up the scale hill during the domain, then descend after you pass the forward-slash.
Of course, it’s all a matter of opinion and definition, and it’s now hard to imagine domains any way other than that to which we are accustomed.
It’s amusing (well, a bit) to think that in some parallel world we experienced the “com dot bubble”.
I must say, as an American, that the .co.uk was very hard for me to learn at first. Even now, I had to check back through your article to make sure that it wasn’t .uk.co. (which, in some way, would make more sense to me…you know, putting the country first and all that). Luckily, now that I own a MacBook, all I have to do is pull up Safari, click on “News” and then click on “BBC News” (of course, you already know that), and I get the international news that is so severely lacking here in the States.
By the way, Stephen, you’re MY favorite living Englishman, just so you know.
He must hate being described as the greatest living Englishman. I know I do, especially when there are candidates like Christopher Biggins and José Mourinho about. I’d personally nominate a certain man called Fry, if only to give me a good reason to leave a comment on his blog.
I mean no insult to Sir Tim – unquestionably his invention (and the thousands built upon it) have changed our world in a billion incredible ways over the past decade or two. But is a single achievement greater than a multitude?
I can’t remember if it was in TBL’s book or an article about him, but I recall him expressing regrets for the way he formatted the domain system.
I think the logical format would be:
country-code.type.name
So uk.com.bbc or us.org.foodbank
And based on the country you were in, com.google would (silently) point to us.com.google.
Is the inventor of the WWW the best Brit ever?…
Stephen Fry asks if Tim Berners-Lee is the greatest living Englishman….
[...] Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » “Is this the greatest living Englishman?†[...]
If he is indeed the inventor of the world wide web I owe my CPE certificate to him because I wouldn’t have learned English this well and this quickly without ‘the interwebs.’
I only wanted to say, though, that I am immensely fascinated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s differently coloured eyes. *stares*
Well, we’ve got to deal with the “dot com dot ph” and the “dot gov dot ph” here for several Philippine websites. I personally think combining the last two would suffice, but who would want a web address ending in “phom” or “ukom”?
Stephen, I am surprised you didn’t buy bbc.com before it was snapped up. I did something similar for my previous company and was (eventually) recognised for my foresight.
I work for The British Library where we do have a .uk address. However, this has now become something of a handicap as it is so uncommon. People nearly always hear (and type) co.uk when I say bl.uk
I was too slow to buy a local domain name for myself so resorted to Niue when it became available a few years back, giving me infield.nu
According to Wikipedia there are a few other .uk domains in use:
“Examples include parliament.uk (Parliament), bl.uk and british-library.uk (the British Library), nls.uk (the National Library of Scotland), nhs.uk (The National Health Service), and jet.uk (UKAEA as operator of the Joint European Torus experimental fusion tokamak).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk
My favorite .uk domain level is “gov.uk”. It looks exactly like the Russian curse word “govnuk” with one letter ‘bleeped’ out. I won’t go into what the word means, but let’s just say that the website “www.royal.gov.uk” makes me giggle every time I see it.
.com.au and .co.nz are two other examples (with the .org.au .gov.au etc combinations as well).
The discrepancy might seem less if the USA used .us more frequently (as in del.icio.us), but they snagged most of the plain .com names.
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptHe had failed to notice that his full initials feature prominently in TaBuLator and it was perhaps wrong of me to point it out, but the squirms of self-deprecation were marvellous to watch. This is a man who could have taken a hundredth … [...]
Like someone else has mentioned, you know you are my fave living Englishman
Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about the domain names… we used to have only .com.sg/.net.sg/.org.sg here which really limited the accessibility of domains to proper companies or organisations. Perhaps the local registrar realised they could make more money by releasing .sg domains, which have been available for some time now and are open to anyone with a local address. Heh.
[...] greatest British idea? Mr Stephen Fry, who keeps a very readable blog, wrote on Tim Berners-Lee’s bid for the title of greatest living Britishman. Sir Tim is the [...]
It’s all too bloody late now. That’s the problem. The domain name rush has left the web infected with these domain speculators who buy up even the most seemingly unattractive domain name to try and grab some profit from people with a genuine use for them.
The real gripe I have with domain names right now it the .mobi suffix. I though – and hoped – we were moving away from device specificism on the web (the days of ‘This website works best in Netscape Navigator 4 at 800 by 600), but these ‘built for mobile device’ sites whilst seeming like a great idea are not necessary to provide mobile friendly versions of your favourite hi-fi websites. We can control all that nonsense through stylesheets. If you really want to provide a special mobile friendly URL, surely the m.whatever.com pattern is better. It’s less typing for a start, and if you have one of those there iPhone thingies (not out here in Japan yet otherwise I’d be adding to my own apple-arsenal with one) you’ll appreciate the brevity of it.
Back to the subject at Hand, TBL is the guardian of the web, and I owe him more than I could ever pay!
I’d love to hear what you have to say about the ‘Semantic Web’ Stephen!
You can avoid the www tongue twister by saying “dub dub dub”.
On the domain name issue, geographic location doesn’t normally matter and although few people know what .com means everyone has heard of it. So follow Stephen’s example with this blog and use .com!
I quite like the .co.uk thing too. It’s pleasantly quirky, though I do see the authoritative appeal in a good, solid ‘.com’.
Oh another note, Mr Fry, as a great admirer of yours and with an offer of publishing for my very first book (Hurah! Not too bad for a student of 21), I’d very much love it if you’d be so obliging as to give the novella a scan and write a review of your thoughts. It’s about, very generally, a road-trip-esque investigation into a BDSM-themed murder, written from the POV of a rather eccentric writer.
A long shot in asking you, I know, as you’re a terribly busy man, but with the prospect of such a wonderful thing, I figured it was worth a shot.
Many thanks, Sir. I shall keep looking forward to your blessays.
~ Kayleigh Moore
krax.sintax@gmail.com
Oh yes, quite possibly the greatest living Englishman, huzzah for the www =]
Although from a personal view Mr Fry himself tops my list
Stephen, you are soooo sexy. Probably the sexiest man I can think of after Brad Pitt. I think I’m in love with you. You’re fascinating. (And dead right about .uk, let the revolution begin!)
I’m terribly disappointed, Stephen, to find that you, of all people, have fallen for this silly new fashion of using “three times more” to mean “three times as many”. When I was at school, “three times more” meant “four times as many”. According to Gowers, it still did as recently as 1987 (I can’t comment on the 2004 edition, as I don’t have a copy to hand.)
Polonius (a pedant)
Man, I thought Al Gore invented the internet…
Clark
Clark: Al Gore invented (or rather, funded the invention of) the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, which is one of many applications (email is another) running on top of the Internet.
Stephen: I believe that bbc.co.uk was actually snapped up quietly very early in the ‘net’s history by a guy at R&D who had the same thought as you but decided it was easier to just register the domain than to explain the issue to his superiors. Never underestimate the boffins at Kingswood…
It makes you wonder what the internet would have been worth if Sir Tim *had* started charging royalties. How many people would have got onto it? How many blogs would never have even been thought of?
(How much spam would never have been sent!?)
Meanwhile, Tim gets to use it too!
I can understand the need for .co.uk, as it presents alternatives like .gov.uk, .me.uk and so on.
Similarly, here in Australia there’s .com.au, .net.au, .gov.au, .org.au, .edu.au and .id.au (for individuals, like .me.uk), among others.
There are also state-based 2LDs (eg .nsw.au, .vic.au) or a combination (eg. .nsw.gov.au)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.au
New Zealand has the intriguing .maori.nz and .geek.nz (for tech-savvy registrants)
What I find confusing is why NZ and UK are .co while Australia is .com
If you look up leoniesmith.com, you find an Australian jazz singer. If you look up leoniesmith.co.uk, right now you don’t find anything because I’ve yet to use the domain name but I’ve owned it for five years now. I always wish I’d jumped in and bought the .com when I first thought about it, many moons ago!
You are not alone in this misery. My country, Serbia (and different Yugoslavias before that), also has the “fancy” extra initials in our URLs: .co.yu. Even more horror inducing are domains for our universities: .bg.ac.yu, .ns.ac.yu etc.
But, there’s hope for us yet. We will soon be getting the long awaited and longed for .rs domain, since the .yu part of our current domain refers to a country that is no more..
A bit extreme just for a domain change, if you ask me. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Web sites should set themselves up to make the www optional these days. And next time you’ve got D.G. trapped in a corner tell him to take a memo and dictate that it’s no longer necessary to spell out the dots in bbc.co.uk and slash the `forward’ from the `forward slash’. `bbc co uk slash news’ seems intelligible.
What with the corrupt overseers of .com allowing speculators to start to register domain names, thereby hogging them, only to bail out a little later, no money spent, having seen whether anyone else has shown an interest, we need a better system. One old suggestion I like is that anyone can register any domain name as long as it contains at least two dots. This knocks everyone out of the `two word’ domains and allows a multitude of alternatives to stuffy old .co.uk.
Goodness gracious me, it is almost as enjoyable to read the comments as it is to read the blessays
Anyhow, latest installment of Stephen Fry Appreciation Monday is up, do pop by
http://www.couchslobs.com/?p=104
Sir Tim mentioned the order of the domnain name in an interview I had the pleasure of doing with him.
See here: http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3337
And here for recent blogpost (from Sir Tim and me): http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConBlogEntry.253
“He had no idea, and I don’t blame him, what I was talking about. This was about 1993 and only sad acts like me had heard of the internet. About six months later, however, it was too late…”
Count me among the “sad acts” (cough Gopher! cough) — when I left my job at Harvard Med to attend grad school in 1993, I was assuring folks there that this internet thing was going to be big. Of course this is Harvard — when I arrived in 1989 at the School of Public Health, they were still using some rotary phones! When I interviewed for the job at the Med School (1991), the look of horror on my face must have been plain, for the dean interviewing me assured me that the Wang word processors on all the desks were about to be replaced with PCs.
I recall, not too long before I left, the IT group gave a presentation to faculty about all the uses of the internet and how it would affect sharing research, etc. At the end of the presentation, a faculty member raised his hand and asked whether he needed a computer for that.
I’d definitely have to agree that TBL should top the hit parade of Great Brits. It’s interesting to note that his original concept for the www was more akin to what we now know as wikis in that it was meant to be read many-write many.
On another note, there is certainly a case to be made for stephen.uk, there is after all a police.uk, a parliament.uk, a british-library.uk, and as someone else pointed out a me.uk
David Bradley
Sciencebase.com
To answer your first question – he is yes – with the exception of you Stephen!
I actually remember when bbc.co.uk was the site to go to and bbc.com went to the Boston company’s site. Then it went to a page that declared that the Boston company had very kindly allowed the BBC to obtain the domain and had a link to the Boston company’s new website.
Gilmore:
if you want to be really confused, consider the fact that Japan (for some reason) uses .or.jp rather than .org.jp
Mr. Fry, for simplicity’s sake become European and register all your future domains with .eu – as I have…
so, Australia, Japan, UK, New Zealand… all with a two-level domain name…. all islands, with wrong unit measures and on the side of the road… anything else?
oh, sorry. And UK is also in Europe. But with the wrong currency.
Stephen, is it a way to distinguish yourselves from all other “normal-single-level-domained” countries?
))
…
I remember when it took the today program ages to get to grips with web addresses. Remember Mr. Humphreys reading out:
“aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash doubleyou doubleyoo doubleyoo dot bee bee see dot co dot you kay forward slash radiofour (that’s all one word folks) forward slash today”
After a number of letters that said, firstly, you don’t need the “aitch tee” nonsense, then saying you don’t need the “doubleyou” nonsense and you can cut out the “radiofour”, they gradually cut it down and got to grips with it.
Now, how much easier for Mr. Humphreys to read out:
“bbc.com slash today” or, if sense prevails, “bbc.uk slash today”.
Sorry, as much as I love what Tim has done, Neil Gaiman has already declared Alan Moore the Greatest Living Englishman. He reaffirmed it today with a picture of Alan drinking tea and looking Great.