Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor. London: Orion Business Books, 1999. (ISBN: 0 75282 090 7)
The irony is that in all its various guises -- commerce, research, and surfing -- the Web is already so much a part of our lives that familiarity has clouded our perception of the Web itself. To understand the Web in the broadest and deepest sense, to fully partake of the vision that I and my colleagues share, one must understand how the Web came to be. (p.2)
I immediately began to think of a name for my nascent project. [...] An alternative was The Information Mine, but,... Besides, the idea of a mine wasn't quite right, because ..., and it represented only getting information out -- not putting it in. (p.26)
My vision was a system in which sharing what you knew or thought should be as easy as learning what someone else knew. [...] The need to make all documents in some way 'equal' was also essential. The system should not constrain the user; a person should be able to link with equal ease to any document wherever it happened to be stored. (p.36)
The fundamental principle behind the Web was that once someone somewhere made available a document, database, graphic, sound, video or screen at some stage in an interactive dialogue, it should be accessible (subject to authorisation, of course) by anyone, with any type of computer, in any country. And it should be possible to make a reference -- a link -- to that thing, so that others could find it. (p.40)
The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect -- to help people work together -- and not as a technical toy. the ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. (p.133)
The ability to refer to a document (or a person or anything else) is a fundamental right of free speech. (p.152)
Once something is made public, one cannot complain about its address being passed around. (p.154)