Tim Berners-Lee shares his vision for a collaborative web

Tim Berners-Lee founded the Web in the early 1990s as a tool for collaboration. But that initial vision has been pushed aside by read-only web browsers better suited to consuming content than collaborating.

Web2 has since brought us apps, mobile devices, and the cloud. But data and authentication were tightly tied to apps for security reasons. As a result, the Web2 era has been defined by a few big companies using our data to lock us into their platforms.

Berners-Lee is currently working on a new data sharing standard called Solid, which could help bring the initial vision to life, and on a company, Inrupt, to help bring that vision to market. He warns that this new vision of Web 3.0 to give back control of our data differs enormously from current Web3 efforts built on less efficient blockchains.

Core features of Solid include support for the following:

Global single sign-on. Global access control. Universal API focused on people rather than applications.

VentureBeat recently sat down with Berners-Lee to learn more about his initial idea for the web, recent progress, and vision for the future.

Berners-Lee said he knew the web was going to be important early on. “I wanted it to be a read-write website immediately,” he said. "I wanted to be able to collaborate with him and do GitHub-like things for my software team at CERN in 1990."

At the time, there were about 13 theoretical physicists at CERN, while the rest of the team were engineers. Berners-Lee looked for ways to make it easier for teams to collaborate from different offices. "They had to communicate via the internet, which was only becoming politically correct to use in projects," he said.

The first browser editor was built on a powerful NeXT workstation. People could link and add information to websites. Information could flow through the team to create a new balance as knowledge was added, corrected, or extended.

"All team members are in a balance from a knowledge standpoint, where this piece of web represents all the work they've done," he said.

Sidelined by Web 1.0

But this initial vision has been pushed aside by the massive popularity of less capable browsers that can run on both PC and Mac, such as Mozilla, Netscape, and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

"We didn't really get that [vision] because it took off as a publishing medium," Berners-Lee said.

They also faced other challenges in expanding the work at CERN more widely. While some of the collaboration capabilities worked in a tightly controlled environment like CERN, more work was needed on single sign-on, authorization, and granular data sharing to scale those ideas.

Berners-Lee was also disappointed with the content generation tools used to build websites. Its first read-write browser took a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) approach, whereas other HTML editors designed for publishing required a complex tag nesting process closer to programming than editing a collaborative document.

“It was amazing to see people writing HTML files by hand,” he said. "I wasn't ready to do that. I wanted to highlight something, link it, and save it. I figured in 1989 it would be easy since Microsoft Word already did that."

Lay the foundations

Berners-Lee continued this research over the next few years in the UK and then at MIT. He also incorporated these improvements into the Solid standard and helped found Inrupt to expand adoption of the new infrastructure.

Berners-Lee uses Solid to capture data from all aspects of his life in an editable and shareable way. He stores his bank statements, documents, photos, music, IoT data, and exercise data on a Solid storage service on his Mac Mini. He is very enthusiastic about the idea that this could improve collaboration between individuals, companies they trust and governments, in a safe way.

Solid already supports government services, privacy-preserving medical research, and new home improvement services that combine product manuals and energy management. This is just the beginning. Eventually, he thinks Solid could have an impact as profound, if not greater, than the first version of the web.

"We should have called the first Web 0.3, and then we would be in a good place now," he said.