Web's Inventor Says Web In Infancy

The web's inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC News that the world wide web is "still in its infancy". Sir Berners-Lee was speaking ahead of the 15th anniversary of the day the web's code was put into the public domain by Cern, the lab where the web was developed.

The future web will put "all the data in the world" at the fingertips of every user, Sir Tim said.

"The web has been a tremendous tool for people to do a lot of good even though you can find bad stuff out there."

Making the web free to use had a vital role in spreading its use worldwide. Internet research firm Netcraft estimates that there are now 165 million different websites around the world.

Sir Tim said he was optimistic about the future of the web.

"The experience of the development of the web by so many people collaborating across the globe has just been a fantastic experience," he said.

"The experience of international collaboration continues. Also the spirit that really we have only started to explore the possibilities of [the web], that continues."

Sir Tim predicted that the web's ability to engender collaboration could one day see the web being used to help manage the planet.

"What's exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance.

"My hope is that those will produce... new ways of working together effectively and fairly which we can use globally to manage ourselves as a planet."

The ubiquity of the web gives the impression that its success was inevitable but that was not always the case, said Robert Cailliau, who worked alongside Sir Tim.

The decision by physics laboratory Cern to release the web code into the public domain was not a straightforward one, he told BBC News.

Mr Cailliau helped draw up one of the early technical proposals for the web and later helped convince the directors at Cern to "give the web away".

"The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the web was going to be," he said.

"We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore Cern couldn't hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away."

He added: "We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn't very much in favour of that."

He said competing technologies, such as Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota, were also offering a method of using hyperlinks to connect documents across computers on the internet.

"If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.

"We would have had some sort of market share alongside services like AOL and Compuserve, but we would not have flattened the world."

Web Pages : Size Matters!

A recent analysis indicates that the size of the average web page has tripled since 2003, up from 94k to 312k (!). Also, the number of objects on the page has doubled to a whopping 50 objects per page.

Details of this excellent analyis that combined website data from two studies are at WebsiteOptimization.com, where they conclude with some advice for designers:

Within the last five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has nearly doubled. While broadband users have experienced faster load times, dial-up users have been left behind. With the average web page sporting more than 50 external objects, object overhead now dominates most web page delays. Minimizing HTTP requests by using CSS sprites, combining JavaScript or CSS files, reducing the number of EOs, and converting graphic effects to CSS while still retaining attractiveness, has become the most important skill set for web performance optimizers.

It's easy to see how wider use of broadband and high speed internal networks have combined with a lot of misunderstanding to create corporate and small business websites that are often bloated with questionable graphics, pictures, and design elements. Although a shift is underway, search optimizers are generally much lower on the corporate food chain than, say, a brand manager who will be reluctant to sacrifice powerful design components for a faster page loading time.

Complicating these matters is the fact that many consultants and even internet IT departments generally create web redesign presentations for high speed or internal networked environments that are many times faster than normal user interaction. Dial up is still a common method of connection in the USA yet few websites are well optimized for low bandwidth - arguably losing thousands of potential sales as customers leave in frustration with slow page loads.

Recommendation? Take some lessons from Craigslist and start with the most spartan, efficient, optimized environment you can imagine and then add design elements only if they are essential to your online functionality. Are customers basing decisions based on the *look* of your website? In some cases yes, but in general I'd suggest customers will prefer a fast and functional site to a pretty one, and sites that err on the side of function rather than form will see higher conversion and interaction levels.