TAMPERE, FINLAND – The mass market for mobile internet will remain untapped until designers learn to build simpler web pages better suited for mobile handsets, according to the inventor of the World Wide Web.”(The mobile Internet) will be a huge enabler for the industry … and for big profits,” Tim Berners-Lee told a seminar on Thursday on the future of the Web.
“Web designers have learned to design for the visually impaired and for other people. They will learn in a few years how to make Web sites available for people with mobile devices too,” he said.
Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the Web in 1990 while working at European particle-physics lab CERN in Geneva. He was trying to find a way to make it easier to share information between scientists and collaborate over the internet.
While the advent of the internet has revolutionalized the way people work and communicate around the world, mobile operators have not had an easy time luring users over to mobile internet.
“Everyone was supposed to be browsing the Web with their mobile phone, but the problem is that it has not happened,” Berners-Lee said, adding that it was not the most pressing question.
“It is a chicken or egg thing, just like originally when the Web became the Web. Nobody asked for Web clients or Web servers … you have to get enough people to understand the potential returns,” he added.
Berners-Lee’s original vision of the Web was as a resource tool to be used for collaboration. In this regard, he said, the web has been “a big disappointment,” with the exception of “wikis” (interactive online note pads) which show potential.
“Wikis in general are great examples of how people want to be creative and not just suck in information,” he said, pointing to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as the most advanced development in this area.
The information on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) can be edited by the site’s users. There are currently around 500,000 items on the web page.
