"In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it"
About this Quote
The nostalgia is doing quiet political work here: Berners-Lee is talking about 1993-94 browser chaos, but he’s really staging an argument for the Web as a public commons rather than a mall owned by whichever company ships the most popular software.
On the surface, it’s a developer gripe about incompatible “flavors” of HTML. Underneath, it’s a warning about power. When every browser interprets the language differently, the author of a page isn’t just writing for humans; they’re negotiating with gatekeepers. “What you could put” becomes a question of permission, and “reliably have…readership see it” turns into a reminder that audiences are mediated by tooling. If your content breaks in one dominant browser, you don’t merely lose pixels-you lose people. Compatibility is culture.
The phrase “most of your readership” is the tell. Berners-Lee frames the problem as readership, not users, and that choice recasts the early Web as publishing infrastructure. He’s defending the idea that anyone should be able to write once and be understood widely, without paying an interoperability tax. The early “flavors” weren’t quaint experimentation; they were the precondition for fragmentation, where standards get replaced by de facto control.
Context matters: the Web was still young, and browsers were racing for features that differentiated products, not a shared language that stabilized the medium. Berners-Lee’s intent is to make standardization feel less like bureaucracy and more like free speech mechanics: if you can’t count on being seen, you’re not really speaking.
On the surface, it’s a developer gripe about incompatible “flavors” of HTML. Underneath, it’s a warning about power. When every browser interprets the language differently, the author of a page isn’t just writing for humans; they’re negotiating with gatekeepers. “What you could put” becomes a question of permission, and “reliably have…readership see it” turns into a reminder that audiences are mediated by tooling. If your content breaks in one dominant browser, you don’t merely lose pixels-you lose people. Compatibility is culture.
The phrase “most of your readership” is the tell. Berners-Lee frames the problem as readership, not users, and that choice recasts the early Web as publishing infrastructure. He’s defending the idea that anyone should be able to write once and be understood widely, without paying an interoperability tax. The early “flavors” weren’t quaint experimentation; they were the precondition for fragmentation, where standards get replaced by de facto control.
Context matters: the Web was still young, and browsers were racing for features that differentiated products, not a shared language that stabilized the medium. Berners-Lee’s intent is to make standardization feel less like bureaucracy and more like free speech mechanics: if you can’t count on being seen, you’re not really speaking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Tim
Add to List
