Timothy Berners-Lee, considered the "father of the Web" for his original work on a World Wide Web browser/editor enabling him to communicate with a colleague through an info.cern.ch server, was named a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, on the same honors list that includes British rock music pioneers Eric Clapton and Ray Davies.
"This is an honor which applies to the whole Web development community, and to the inventors and developers of the Internet, whose work made the Web possible," he said in a formal statement. "I accept this as an endorsement of the spirit of the Web; of building it in a decentralized way; of making best efforts to keep it open and fair; and of ensuring its fundamental technologies are available to all for broad use and innovation, and without having to pay licensing fees.
"By recognizing the Web in such a significant way, it also makes clear the responsibility its creators and users share," Berners-Lee's acceptance statement continued. "Information technology changes the world, and as a result, its practitioners cannot be disconnected from its technical and societal impacts. Rather, we share a responsibility to make this work for the common good, and to take into account the diverse populations it serves."
Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 and in due course was named one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th Century by Time. But he told LinuxWorld.com his original idea – his partner in that first computer communication was colleague Robert Cailliau – was that the Web should be collaborative space for mutual information sharing.
"The idea," he said, "was that by writing something together, and as people worked on it, they could iron out misunderstanding."
While at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, Berners-Lee wrote for his own use a program for storing information on the random-association basis, which is considered to have been the conceptual basis for what eventually became the Web's development. Almost a decade later he developed the global hypertext project soon to be known as the World Wide Web, based on that earlier work, aiming to let people work together through an aligned series of hypertext documents, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
