Tim Berners-Lee

One Web Day 2007

Hello everybody. This is Tim Berners-Lee

with a message for everybody involved in OneWebDay.

Thank you for holding OneWebDay, I think it's a wonderful idea.

There are all kinds of wonderful things that happened last year,

and I'm sure all kinds of wonderful things will happen this year too.

But, okay, I've been asked to go over my concerns about the web.

And alot of them I've blogged about,

some of them I've even video blogged about before.

Net Neutrality I think is very important, of course, that you should be able to

pay more for better bandwidth. That's not what Net Neutrality is about.

And I hope that those who try to argue against Net Neutrality stop trying

to misrepresent what the argument is.

So Net Neutrality is something that is important, the fact that

anybody can connect to anybody.

If we lost that, then I think the amount of,

just the web would not be the same at all.

It wouldn't be anything like the fount of creativity and entrepreneurials

that there is out there, entrepreneurship.

I guess one thing, I'd call web rot, is something I like to just warn people against.

What's web rot?

Web rot is a sort of cycle we get into in which people make websites carelessly.

They don't make good HTML, they don't close their tags.

They put semicolon's where they shouldn't be, for example,

between the attributes of HTML elements.

Check your pages, make sure they validate.

Use testerss of all different sorts to make sure they're, of course, accessible as well.

But also just make sure that you really have used the standard,

you've used the right syntax. Don't just check that it works in a browser

because browser's are at the moment too forgiving.

The second thing I would like to happen is browsers change.

A couple of things I could imagine that browsers could do.

One is you could tell a browser, "this is my website."

Just as you say, "I trust downloads from this website,"

and although browser has a list of the websites,

it should have a list of websites where "this is my website,

I want to see warnings, I want to see the style sheet, syntax errors.

I want to see the HTML syntax errors and the XML syntax errors."

So there's something which website owners can do,

something that browser developers can do to help stop and reverse web rot.

But, meanwhile, all these exciting things are happening.

Now we're getting the web coming on mobile devices.

We're getting the web coming on so many different sorts and shapes of devices,

not just small ones that we carry around, but also huge screens.

Huge screens that we stick on our living room wall,

that we put on the meeting room wall.

And so we're having to learn how to make information so that it will work,

whether we're using it from a small device or a large one.

So I suppose that's all the time I'll take from you.

I would say if there's one thing, it's use the standards in all the things you do

however exciting they are, make sure you stick to the standards, interoperability.

Let us celebrate all things that happened because of the interoperability we have.

Let's celebrate that the interoperability, the things working together

that we do have. And let's constantly work to make more, better,

cleaner, stronger and deeper interoperability across the planet.

Thank you very much for watching, listening.

Happy OneWebDay.

One Web Day, Sept. 22, 2007

onewebday.org