This week, Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave a keynote talk at the International Digital Publishing Forum’s Digicon conference in Chicago. Sir Tim’s talk, “Realizing the Vision of Publishing Technology Being Web Technology,” discussed the future of publishing on the Web and moves toward seamless integration between print and digital publishing.
Publisher’s Weekly provided a recap of the talk:
“…Berners-Lee, who is also founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), outlined the history of the Web as publishing channel—albeit an anarchic, innovative and disruptive one—and its future as enabler for publishing technologies far beyond anything we can conceive of today. Indeed his talk comes as IDPF (which creates digital publishing standards) and W3C (which creates Web standards) membership convene during BEA to discuss the merits of a possible merger of the two organizations.
Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the Web, said ‘setting up a website is like setting up a bookstore,’ comparing his invention to the earlier launch of Project Gutenberg, the open source e-book project founded in 1971. Berners-Lee went on to outline the development of the Web from its early users—’scientists, geeks, and people with lots of data’—to a ‘massive shift from static Web links to being a Web where every online page could be programmed like a computer.’”
