GENEVA – Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, finally has admitted that he misspelling “worldwide” when he created the web twenty years ago.
Mr. Berners-Lee was employed as a junior programmer at a nuclear research center near Geneva, Switzerland, when he wrote a proposal that led eventually to the creation of the world wide web. He told an audience at the twentieth-anniversary party for that proposal on Friday that if he could “re-jigger” anything about the web, the spelling of “worldwide” would be it.
“Obviously I wrote the code for the web at a time when spelling checkers weren’t as trustworthy as they are today,” said Mr. Berners-Lee.
“I’ve never been able to spell for shite, myself,” he laughed, “and the spelling checker I used wasn’t for shite either, so I spelled ‘worldwide’ as two words instead of one.”
Mr. Berners-Lee, a British software engineer who is now a physical education instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that if he had a Euro for every time somebody pointed out his mistake to him, “I’d be a rich bastard today.”
Next on Mr. Berners-Lee’s list of regrets was his decision to begin web addresses with “http://.”
“The double slashes following ‘http:’ are obviously redundant,” he said, “and that has led to billions of wasted keystrokes at who knows what cost to the environment.
“Obviously keyboards weren’t as trustworthy when I wrote the code for the web as they are today,” said Mr. Berners-Lee, “and even though I could have sworn I hit the forward-slash key only once, it registered two slashes every time instead.”
In related news, Mr. Berners-Lee said he was concerned that the world wide web “will become a giant eavesdropping device” that will allow “corrupt institutions like the Recording Industry Association of America” to spy on innocent file-sharing activities, “which is why I created the web in the first place–to allow scientists to exchange music and pictures of their grandkids more easily.”
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