Well … not quite, but I was interested to discover that Time Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, grew up in Sheen, London SW14, home of infolaw, and went to Sheen Mount primary school not 100 yards from my front door where my children followed some years later. He then went on to secondary school at Emmanuel, London SW18, a few hundred yards from where I lived for 2 years in the late 70s.

Now these coincidences have no real meaning, except perhaps to demonstrate the reach of the web and its power. Using your favourite search engine you can quickly research such connections), then make a direct connection using Tim’s 3 standards.

A quick history of the web (courtesy of the Wikipedia)

The web can be traced back to a project at CERN in Switzerland in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau built the ENQUIRE system which contained many of the same core ideas. Berners-Lee published a more formal proposal for what he named the World Wide Web and wrote the first web page in November 1990. Over Christmas of that year he built all the tools necessary for a working web, including the first web browser (which was a web editor as well) and the first web server. For two years this remained an internal project, until in April 1993 CERN released the specification for free use.

The web is built on three core standards: the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which specifies how each page of information is given a unique address; the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which specifies how the browser and server send the information to each other; and the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), an encoding scheme enabling the information to be displayed on a variety of devices. Berners-Lee now heads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which develops and maintains these standards and others that enable computers on the web effectively to store and communicate all kinds of information.