Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web (Book Review)

By jgn on Monday, February 16, 2026 in Reading, Reviews, and Technology

I found this book to be hype-y in that Berners-Lee's invention was somewhat slight, really - yet another client/server system (cf. WAIS, Hyper-G, Brown's Intermedia, and even Andrew). Yes, it's based on a graph, not a hierarchy like Gopher. There was a lot of right place, right time. Of course the web deserves its kudos, but there is some pain in that he's constantly harping on the positive evolution of the web. People now use apps, and the casual exchange of ideas and words happens on apps, in essentially walled gardens (Facebook, etc.). Even when the web is the vehicle for the desktop, it all happens on apps nowadays. Meanwhile, the web (HTTP and HTML) missed out on some of the fundamental ideas of hypertext as advanced by Ted Nelson (bi-directional links; transclusion; a micro-payments system built it), and even Vannever Bush/the Menex, which was more purposely, facilitating an essentially academic workstation. Berners-Lee suggests that the web was distributed in a way Xanadu wasn't; but Xanadu was also (in theory) distributed. Much of the innovation that came later (HTTP 1.1, CSS, accessibility standards, multi-media handling) were because of deficits in the original spec.

Meanwhile, while acknowledging that there have been massively compromising subversions of the promise of computer-mediated communication (e.g., Cambridge Analytica, the grotesque manipulation of third-party cookies), Berners-Lee is relentlessly optimistic about the web and its future: He's kind of a Candide telling us about the best of all possible worlds. He also narrates every (it seems) prize or award he received, which gets pretty tedious.

And then there is SOLID and the idea of having a personal "pod" with all of your data. Great stuff, but as he acknowledges in passing, this is not unlike an online wallet. I don't see the innovation.

I'm tempted to have Claude spruce this up, but I think I'll move on.

Originally reviewed on Goodreads on 16 February 2026.