When it was invented in 1991, the World Wide Web connected together an Internet that was overrun with many thousands of individual, fragmented digital documents. HTML, hypertext markup language, ...

Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeopardy!,” his name usually goes for at least sixteen hundred dollars.

“For the web to have everything on it, everyone had to be able to use it, and want to do so. This was already asking a lot. I couldn’t also ask that they pay for each search or upload they made. In ...