This is For Everyone, by Tim Berners-Lee
Completed July 16th, 2026
This was a really fun book to read. There were so many blasts from the past. I remember when I first got online, it would have been somewhere in the mid-1990s and we were looking up Simpsons quotes and downloading images of albums. If I were to put a year on it, I would assume it was 1995. There were so many "core memories" unlocked as the book spoke of the developments of the World Wide Web over the years. It showed me how much infighting was actually happening behind the scenes.
Now, I must admit that I spent much more time enjoying the first half of the book compared to the second. As someone who both enjoys computing and history, it was a real-page turner. I've always known the name of Tim Berners-Lee because I was a proponent of adoption of the W3C standards when I was a web designer. For a while there, my personal web design would have the dual browser check and then the underlying HTML and CSS would change accordingly. At work, we were forced into Internet Explorer for all our internal web applications to first IE 4 (we were on an NT 4.0 network) and then followed up by IE 5. I still shudder when I think of having to write to two standards.
Berners-Lee spends a good chunk of the book going over the fights he was having between open standards and third-parties writing their own standards. I made an assumption that since everything is generally passing the acid tests, that this was no longer an issue. However, I did not know just how much Google had put of themselves into the current HTML5 standard, which ended up in the W3C adopting it as HTML5 instead of issuing their own. I knew that Netscape and Internet Explorer were doing that constantly in the 90s and early 2000s. But also, I had no idea that Mosaic was doing it as well. I figured it was a struggle for the W3C, I didn't realize just how nuts it was. Oh, well.
I found myself nodding furiously with his approach to technology, he is a problem-solution software developer. He discovers a problem, writes a solution, and then pushes that solution. He worked for CERN and there were competing technologies and computer infrastructures, thankfully all using TCP/IP, and in different languages, from different departments. He saw the need for collaboration between these systems and invented a protocol. That is brilliant and necessary. His approach to other technologies he developed or oversaw at the W3C remind me of this very approach: XML, HTTPS, etc. This is an absolutely amazing way to approach technology. When I first started in my career, the web was just exploding so everything "had to be made a webpage". Well, I made a lot of web pages for my company that got some visitors on day 1 and then never again. There was a single project manager, who leveraged the technology to solve problems in his large project. At the end of the day, he had me program a suite of web applications that I ported from project to project because they were that valuable. Berners-Lee has that approach, and I have an insane level of respect for it.
He acknowledges that he grew up in two unusual circumstances: he was born in 1955 and he had two brilliant parents. His parents both knew Alan Turing and were computer-based mathemeticians. His mother gave them an unusual level of education and tools to develop their minds and give them a happy childhood. Growing up at that period means that they were coming of age during a time where tools were available for home-computing, but it was insanely hands on. My father was of this generation, we had a room dedicated to electronics and radios. He was a writer, but still a techie. Having had a father that was a techie gave me unusual opportunities in my youth, I learned to solder, I learned basic radio techniques, I learned how to tear apart a computer and put it back together, I learned both DOS and LINUX (in the mid-90s), and I learned to code. I wrote my first HTML page in 1997. We always had connectivity (back on the C64) to BBS and eventually into CompuServe. It was a wild time, but being BORN at the right time to the RIGHT parents really does set you up for success.
The remainder of the book was primarily about his look into the future, and how the Internet has been overcome with attention vs intention. I really appreciated this portion of the book, and again, I found myself nnodding furiously to all he was saying. However, I yearn for non-algorithm based WWW connectivity, I believe it is a pie-in-the-sky. But that is also why I am here. I'm off social media, but I want to contribute where I can. Yikes.
All that said, I highly recommend this book