Open standards and smartphone apps
Berners-Lee also drew attention to companies that choose to eschew open standards to create ‘closed worlds' such as Apple's iTunes system that identities songs using open URIs but has a proprietary address to limit access.
"You can't make a link to any information in the iTunes world-a song or information about a band. You can't send that link to someone else to see. You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace. For all the store's wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up," he said.
He also widened his attack to the media, which is feverishly producing smartphone apps for magazines and shunning web app functionality, which Berners-Lee described as ‘disturbing' as the material is ‘off the web'.
"You can't bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can't tweet it. It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time," he added.
Berners-Lee warned: "Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine. The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want. But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, "walled gardens," no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates."
"If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth," he added.
