This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee is widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web, by defining its three key standards: HTML (the language to describe a page), HTTP (the protocol to retrieve and update a page or other resource on a server), and URLs (the uniform string format to link between pages and other resources). The book title “This Is For Everyone” is a callback to the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London, where Tim tweeted the text - to celebrate the UK’s role in tech.

The book is mostly a memoir about Tim’s youth, education, and formative years including joining CERN, creating the standards and their first implementations, and promoting it globally until it became ubiquitous. It also covers Tim’s later work to help the web mature, including co-founding the World Wide Web Foundation and the W3C, and his creation of the Solid project (initially at MIT, and then at his commercial venture Inrupt) to promote web decentralization and personal data ownership.

While it was interesting to re-read about the emergence of the web, the writing wasn’t always engaging to me. There was a bit too much of the ‘we were invited to this party’ or ‘this ceremony’ or ‘received this award’ kind of content, where I’d rather have read more about the technology itself. I understand that the book is aimed at a broader, less technical audience, but that made it less compelling to me.

One section that stood out negatively to me was Tim’s description of Ian Hickson and his role in the development of HTML5 (vs XHTML, which Tim had initially promoted as a stricter evolution of HTML). I worked a few times with Ian on Flutter at Google, so I was naturally interested in how the book rather aggressively condemns Ian’s actions and his character. I couldn’t find any proof for this, and it felt very out of place in a book. I really wish Tim’s editor had talked him out of including this, as it comes across as peevish.