Web inventor to be knighted

Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the World Wide Web, has been awarded a knighthood in today's New Year Honours List. The 48-year-old Briton, now living in the US, will be made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to the global development of the internet. In 1989 Berners-Lee, working as a consultant software engineer in Geneva, proposed a global hypertext project to be known as the World Wide Web. It was designed to let people work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. Berners-Lee wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd", and the first client, "World Wide Web," in October 1990. He also wrote the first version of the document formatting language with the capability for hypertext links, known as HTML. In a statement, Berners-Lee said: "This is an honour which applies to the whole web development community, and to the inventors and developers of the internet, whose work made the web possible." "I accept this as an endorsement of the spirit of the web; of building it in a decentralized way; of making best efforts to keep it open and fair; and of ensuring its fundamental technologies are available to all for broad use and innovation, and without having to pay licensing fees." Mr Berners-Lee now heads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.