Supplementary material to the book
Buy: from Amazon.com (paperback), Barnes & Noble (paperback), Booksamillion (paperback), Borders (paperback), Powells (paperback), or Wordsworth (paperback). *
This book is written to address the questions most people ask - From "What were you thinking when you invented it?" through "So what do you think of it now?" to "Where is this all going to take us?", this is the story.
It is not a technical book. (If you want the technical details, check out the W3C web site!). It does mention a little about how technologies you may have heard of - like XML - fit in to the past, present and future, but only in the course of charting the course for the Web from the initial dream - still largely unfulfilled - to the next technical and social revolution.
-TimBL
The book is available from all good bookstores in the US and on the web (eg from Amazon,, Barnes & Noble, Booksamillion, Borders, or Wordsworth. *)
| Language/Country | Publisher | ISBN | Approx. date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chinese (complex characters) | Commercial Press | . | 1999 |
| Chinese (simplified characters) | Shanghai Translation Publishing House | . | ? |
| Danish Webbets Vej Til Verden | Adlandia | 87-981179-2-0 | 2001/05/17 |
| Dutch - De Wereld van het World Wide Web | Nieuwezijds | 9057120909 | |
| English /UK + Australia | Orion business, now Texere | 0694521256 (hardback)
(also in paperback) |
1999/11/25 |
| English /USA |
Harper San Francisco | 0062515861 (paperback) 0062515861 (hardback, out of print) 0694521256 (audio) |
1999/9/22 |
| German Der Web-Report | ECON | 3-430-11468-3 | 2000/1/1 |
| Italian L'Architettura del Nuovo Web | Feltrinelli | . | 2001/03/09 |
| Japanese. Trans: Toru Takahashi et. al. | Mainichi Communications, rec.price: 2400yen + tax | 48399-0287-9 | 2001/09/01 |
| Spanish Tejiendo la red | Siglo Editores | 84-323-1040-9 | 2000/05 |
[From the Harper edition cover flap, Harper say:]
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has been hailed by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest minds of this century. His creation has already changed the way people do business, entertain themselves, exchange ideas, and socialize with one another. With new online businesses and communities forming every day, the full impact of Berners-Lee's grand scheme has yet to be fully known.
Berners-Lee's creation was fueled by a highly personal vision of the Web as a powerful force for social change and individual creativity. He has never profited personally from the Web but has devoted himself to its continued growth and health. Now, this low-profile genius tells his own story of the Web's origins-from its revolutionary introduction and the creation of the now ubiquitous WWW and HTTP acronyms to how he sees the future development of this revolutionary medium. Today, Berners-Lee continues to facilitate the Web's growth and development as director of the World Wide Web Consortium and from his position at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
Berners-Lee offers insights to help readers understand the true nature of the Web, enabling them to use it to their fullest advantage. He shares his views on such critical issues as censorship, privacy, the increasing power of software companies in the online world, and the need to find the ideal balance between the commercial and social forces on the Web. His incisive criticism of the Web's current state makes clear that there is still much work to be done. Finally, Berners-Lee presents his own plan for the Web's future, one that calls for the active support and participation of programmers, computer manufacturers, and social organizations to make it happen.
His vision of the Web is something much more than a tool for research or communication; it is a new way of thinking and a means to greater freedom and social growth than ever before possible.
TIM BERNERS-LEE, inventor of the Web, is currently the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, the coordinating body for Web development, and he occupies the 3Com Founders chair at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Recipient of numerous awards, he received the distinguished MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. He lives in Cambridge, MA.
"Tim Berners-Lee is the most qualified person on the planet to chronicle the Web. With the introspection and concern only a parent can truly express, he reaches beyond the common soundbytes of our industry to define how the Web is dramatically impacting the very course of humanity." -- Jeff Papows, President and CEO, Lotus Development Corp.
Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the World Wide Web has forever changed the shape of modern life, altering the way people do business, entertain and inform themselves, build communities, and exchange ideas. "If [computer networking] were a traditional science, Berners-Lee would win a Nobel Prize," Novell CEO Eric Schmidt said in Time. when it deemed Berners-Lee one of the greatest 100 minds of this century. Now, in Weaving the Web, the Web's creator speaks his mind about his invention: how it evolved, what its untapped potential is, and what his own personal vision is for its future.
"Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one truly was the work of one man... the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, non-proprietary, and free... It's hard to overstate the impact of the global system he created. It's almost Gutenbergian. He took a powerful communications system that only the elite could use and turned it into a mass medium." --Time Magazine
[From the Harper edition cover flap - I didn't write it ;-)]*if your online bookstore has an operational page for this book which allows online purchase, mail me to be included in this list giving the URI for this book in your store. In association with Amazon.com. This page makes no representation as to the relative merits of bookstores. Nor does it endorse Amazon's silly suggestion that one-click ordering be patentable.
$Id: Overview.html,v 1.67 1999/03/17 03:23:38 timbl Exp $