Berners-Lee Believes HTML5 To Be Risk for Future Web

While many believe that HTML5 will transform the web, the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, is urging caution. He believes there is a potential for technologies to rapidly diverge, while other efforts are duplicated, if technologists don’t make an effort to collaborate.

Bringing together new protocols such as HTML5 is an example of only one challenge faced by the web, Berners-Lee said at the official launch of W3C UK. “The new web is such a broad area, there’s lots of areas advancing in parallel. In HTML 5 there is a huge amount of invention. There are so many people with such an idea of what HTML 5 should be like, and open linked data is doubling every 10 months. So there are technology areas that need looking at.”

Interoperability problems caused by a lack of harmonisation would tend to create a web that is more closed. The ability for the internet to stay open during political unrest, such as the recent issues in Egypt that led to internet access being restricted, is an example of just how fragile the web really is, said Berners-Lee. “People looked at what happened in Egypt and realised what could happen in their town. That raised a lot of interesting questions.”