Robert Cailliau Talks With WikiNews

David Gerard writes "Wikipedia's citizen journalism sister site, Wikinews, has a long and interesting interview with Robert Cailliau, who worked with Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web. 'I also remember a big resistance against PostScript, but what do we see now? PDF everywhere. Fortunately PDF is an open standard and it's fairly elegant, but it could have turned out much worse. SVG did not make it. Tim, who had a longer experience with the internet world, convinced me that the web could only survive if all the code was freely available for everyone who wanted to tinker with it. In 1992-1993 I then worked patiently for some 6 months with CERN's Legal Service to draft a document that put the source code into the public domain. This also implied working to convince the management, up to the Directors, of the need to do so. The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that gave the WWW technology to the world.'"

US vs THEM

"The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that gave the WWW technology to the world."

A telling difference between Europe and the US. If it had been an American with this idea, the line would have read "The result was the document signed on 30 April 1993 that made me a multi-billionaire."

SVG did not make it?

I beg to differ. Maybe if failing is the same as "Not ubiquitous on the web", but I find myself using SVG more and more. My vector work in Inkscape is saved in SVG. I've created dynamically generated SVG and rendered it to static images using Batik, to automatically generate hundreds of heading images for websites. Firefox now supports basic SVG. I wouldn't call it a failure as much as slow adoption...

Re:SVG did not make it?

I like SVG, but I really don't see why so many people have been taking issue with this guy's statement that it has been a failure. First of all, it's pretty clear that he was talking about SVG failing as a web graphics format and in this regard I think he's completely right, I can't think of any page I've ever seen that embedded SVG images in them other than SVG example sites. It doesn't even seem to be gaining much steam now that more browsers support it, Firefox and Opera support natively and although IE doesn't, Adobe includes an SVG plug-in for IE with installations of Acrobat Reader (or at least they did, I haven't checked lately). The only time I regularly run into SVGs on the web is on sites like Wikipedia or sometimes F/OSS project sites, but even there, they're never embedded in the page, they're have a rasterized version of the SVG and then link to the SVG file as a "source" for it.

Outside of the web, I agree, it would be unfair to call SVG a failure, but that said, it hasn't been a runaway success either. SVG has been successful enough that people use it and it's generally well supported by most vector drawing applications, but most people don't work using SVGs, they use whatever format is native to their application (Inkscape users being an obvious exception because its native format effectively is SVG). Also, while SVG has gained acceptance as a platform/application agnostic way to send vector artwork to other people, it's still less popular than other formats like EPS (or even PDFs nowadays).

damn, i miss BBS and Fidonet

I miss those times... Bulletin Board software, messages from strangers, file areas, +++ATH0, first multiplayer games...
ps. i wonder how fast would WWW catch on if it was invented today. threat of national security? ;)

SVG failed?

Errr. Wrong, basically.

TWW

I now hate Tim Berners-Lee.

On the technical side it was not always the best of understanding between me and the team. For example, I was convinced that we needed to build-in a programming language, but the developers, Tim first, were very much opposed. It had to remain completely declarative. Maybe, but the net result is that the programming-vacuum filled itself with the most horrible kluge in the history of computing: Javascript.

Amen.

I can't help but think how much further along web applications would be if there were a programming language built-in from the start.

SVG didn't make it?

Yes, clearly the fact that SVG wasn't used in the manner foreseen indicates it has failed utterly.

I never randomly stumble upon SVGs while browsing the web. Yes, never [wikimedia.org].

PDF is irrelevant to the web.

Yes, you see PDF everywhere, but in virtually every case it's just another downloaded document format. Yes, you *can* view PDF in your browser, but you don't actually get any particular benefit from doing it that way no matter what Adobe seems to think: the fraction of PDFs that contain hyperlinks is negligible, and Adobe's embedded reader is balky and unreliable by comparison with the standalone one. And PDFs are inherently harder to read... the print-quality rendering and page orientation means that the text can not be adapted to the viewer. I recall one of Adobe's early ads for PDF, pushing Postscript as a web technology: they had the same page rendered in Postscript and HTML, and the HTML version had been rendered with deliberately odd browser settings... the Postscript version looked much nicer at first glance.

But even in a print ad, with magazine quality rendering, the Postscript version was completely unreadable and the HTML version was totally legible. As an ad for PDF it showed exactly why PDF isn't an appropriate web technology.

This is not, by the way, an inherent shortcoming of Postscript. It's possible to write Postscript code that does its own layout and adapts to the page dimensions and resolution, but no tools generate Postscript like that because the results don't look as good on paper. Perhaps if the Web had early support for Postscript in browsers it would be used that way by now, and used for scripting instead of Javascript, but that didn't happen.

Regardless of what might have been, PDF is not really relevant to the web today, except as a shining example of how not to create content.

"Windows does not use windows"

My favourite quote from TFA (in reference to the importance or not of tabbed browsing):

Windows does not use windows

Indeed. I've always thought it should have been named "Screens".

Fascinating interview

This is a very fascinating interview -- RTFA, the current discussions here do it disservice.

next-previous Site Navigation still in SeaMonkey

Something I do miss are the "next-previous" functions of the NeXT browser. Current browsers only permit you to follow a link and then to run back and forth over the path you took ("back" and "forward"). The NeXT browser had the additional function of following the next link of the previous page ("next"). That allowed me to make a page which was a list of pages to be looked at and then to walk that "path" with a click per page.

I think he's talking about <link rel="next/previous/contents"> [w3.org] in the head.

SeaMonkey has View > Show/Hide > Site Navigation Bar that shows buttons in the navigation for this. It's not in Firefox, though there's a Site navigation extension [mozilla.org].