In a recent message on the Mozilla College Reps mailing list, a contributor described a note he’d just sent to Microsoft in which he wrote: “Sir Tim Berners Lee did not invent the web for you to hijack it.”. This made me realize that many people’s perception of Web history is skewed depending on when they became aware of the web and how it was introduced to them. Here, I hope to provide a little background which explains some of that early history, and why I think this particular criticism of Microsoft is unfair.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a forum through which competing companies and academic institutions can work together, it was set up by (the aforementioned) Berners-Lee in 1994 due to demand from companies and institutions who wanted definition of how the infant web would evolve.

The W3C has since described this evolution by the publication of recommendations of how things should work.

To give this some historical context:

• The first browser to gain popular acclaim was NCSA Mosaic; when it was originally released as a beta-version (Sept 93) there was no W3C.
• When the Netscape browser was launched in (Oct 94) there was still no W3C.
• When Microsoft licensed the source for NCSA Mosaic from SpyGlass (Aug 94) and used it to begin the development of Internet Explorer, the W3C was still 4 months away from it’s first meeting (Dec 94).

During the “commercial browser years” (94-98) the browser development teams were involved in what has been called “co-opetition”. Each browser had to be compatible enough with the core features of the other so that sites could work with both; whilst each company tried to invent and integrate killer features faster than the other.

The W3C provided the forum for the competing companies to work together, it was not, and is not, a church of the moral high-ground. Corporations pay the W3C for the services it provides through a membership system; they then contribute to the recommendations which the W3C publishes. Effectively then, the W3C uses the commercial desires of these companies as a means of writing and publishing free, publicly accessible, recommendations.

What Tim Berners-Lee invented was an academic tool, a concept system called WorldWideWeb, it’s first implementation was written on a NeXT system and in order for it to grow, it was necessary for third parties to write similar programs for other operating systems. This loose confederation of client software helped increase the number of end-users of the system, which (eventually) grew into the definite article we today call “the World Wide Web”.

I would argue that in creating WorldWideWeb, Berners-Lee stood on the shoulders of giants and created the next logical step. In contrast, his creation and leadership of the W3C and it’s consequent pseudo-democratization of the standardization process is far more important.

I find it useful to think of the W3C as a pseudo-democracy, because it is open, but one has to pay to be involved. Depending on an organisation’s legal status and size there are different levels of membership which cost different amounts. The upshot is that the average man-in-the-street can have little influence over the W3C and it’s recommendations, whereas large corporations (those with the most to gain and the most to lose) can afford to invest to ensure the recommendations are steered in such a way that their agenda is met. George Orwell’s “all animals are equal, some are more equal than others” applies neatly here when referring to W3C non-members and members. In a utopian world a global body with freely elected patrons might be a better structure, until then, the transparency of the W3C is infinitely better than closed collaboration.

An example of all of this, and a key turning point in the public profile of the W3C was the publication of the XML recommendation in 1998, edited by Bray (of Netscape), Paoli (of Microsoft) and Sperberg-McQueen (Univ. Illinois) with contributions from 30+ other individuals and organisations. It is inarguably a critically important information interchange standard and is in the public domain thanks to the cooperation made possible by the W3C.

So Microsoft have contributed to the WWW as much as any other commercial vendor, and although their business practices in related issues have subsequently been found to be illegal by the US Department of Justice, the standards which they helped author during the same period are a part of the open pseudo-democratic web we know today. Consequently, I think the accusation that Microsoft have “hijacked” the World Wide Web is unfair.