Elon University
The prediction, in brief:

Any physical address may be subject to change with time: Hence we encourage the move to lasting names and directory services.

Predictor: Berners-Lee, Tim

Prediction, in context:

The following is an excerpt from an Internet Draft (from the working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force) written by Tim Berners-Lee, contained in a memo written on January 1, 1994. This excerpt discusses the expected life of naming schemes and uniform resource locator addresses (URL): ”The life of a name is limited by any information contained within it which may become prematurely invalid. It is therefore necessary to limit the contents of a name to the information required for the operations above. Other extraneous information about the object (its size, data format, authorisation details, etc.) may in general change with time and should not be part of the name. One might expect such information to be part of the ‘header’ of a object, and for protocols to allow the header information to be retrieved independently of the objects themselves. Any physical address may be subject to change with time: Hence we encourage the move to lasting names and directory services.”

Biography:

Tim Berners-Lee of CERN first released his revolutionary World-Wide Web for initial use in 1991 and with it shared his invention HTML (hypertext mark-up language). He later served as director of W3 Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations whose goal was to find ways to help the Web reach its full potential. (Pioneer/Originator.)

Date of prediction: January 1, 1994

Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure

Subtopic: Protocols

Name of publication: www.w3.org

Title, headline, chapter name: A Unifying Syntax for the Expression of Names and Adresses of Objects on the Network

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.w3.org/History/1995/WWW/Paper/JUNK.TXT

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Bruno, Marian Theresa