Quotes by Tim Lee

• What is a Web year now, about three months? And when people can browse around, discover new things, and download them fast, when we all have agents - then Web years could slip by before human beings can notice.
• The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.
• 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.
• The important thing is the diversity available on the Web.
• The Mobile Web Initiative is important - information must be made seamlessly available on any device.
• The most important thing that was new was the idea of URI-or URL, that any piece of information anywhere should have an identifier, which will allow you to get hold of it.
• 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.
• The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.
• 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.
• We shouldn't build a technology to colour, or grey out, what people say. The media in general is balanced, although there are a lot of issues to be addressed that the media rightly pick up on.
• The Domain Name Server (DNS) is the Achilles heel of the Web. The important thing is that it's managed responsibly.
• Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.
• Most larger companies now see that for the market to grow, Web infrastructure must be royalty-free.
• When it comes to professionalism, it makes sense to talk about being professional in IT. Standards are vital so that IT professionals can provide systems that last.
• You affect the world by what you browse.
• Web pages are designed for people. For the Semantic Web, we need to look at existing databases.
• 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.
• We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges.
• Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.
• 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.
• Sites need to be able to interact in one single, universal space.
• Compared even to the development of the phone or TV, the Web developed very quickly.
• 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.
• Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.
• Everybody who runs a Web site knows we're not assured of compatibility, and we could end up with a split.
• I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.
• I think IT projects are about supporting social systems-about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.
• 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.
• Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.
• IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.
• Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.
• That idea of URL was the basic clue to the universality of the Web. That was the only thing I insisted upon.
• Celebrity damages private life.