Tim Berners-Lee on 30 years of the web: 'We can get the web we want' (2019)
to me, the defining sadness is that the past decade has been the death of apis, the end of interoperability. the word web evokes a weaving together, a connectedness, and that, to me, always extended far beyond the link.<p>of course, what everyone is worried about today is too much sharing, too much tracking. we&#x27;ve focused only on the down-sides of connecting, only on the practically malicious surveillance that connectedness has brought the far of &amp; mighty trackers &amp; ad-networks. we&#x27;ve focused on mis-&#x2F;dis-information &amp; conspiracy theories &amp; a shocking rise of brazen demagoguery connectedness have enabled.<p>to me, we have seen the evils coming out of the box, &amp; sealed it shut, once more trapping hope inside. i still envision the web as a place for small services&#x2F;preferences&#x2F;aspects of personality to exist on focused, narrow sites, that these services work &amp; aggregate together across a variety of other sites. new specifications like Web Share show promise, but are hampered by lack of adoption &amp; implementation being limited to narrow sets of platforms. works like Foreign Fetch (RIP) highlighted the real spirit of adventure to me: the idea that a ServiceWorker could offline serve other sites, other domains. even given the new radical http-cache-partitioning security measures in place, would-have-been&#x2F;could-still-be works like Foreign Fetch continue to highlight to me the real spirit of connectedness &amp; the web.<p>i also see a role for ambient connectivity. Project Eddystone allowed Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons to advertise short urls, that the user could see about them as they moved. primarily used by stores &amp; spammers, this sort of immediate real world linking, to me, is something people &amp; individuals have the best chance to connect &amp; share their world through: a directly advertised link anyone around them can see.<p>third, last, i really hope the semantic web comes about. i want us to begin to interact with the page as more than a giant canvas, a single entity. the data of the page ought express itself. we ought develop tools to surface &amp; interact with data, in-place, where it is encountered.