Sir Tim!

Queen Elizabeth II of Britain is going to knight Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. In 1991, he published a spec for a system which would allow people to collaborate and link together documents, regardless of their physical location, using a scheme of hyperlinks between them. The spec defined HyperText Markup Language and included the source code for a text-based combined browser/editor. (He has since apologised for "http://", not realising at the time that so many people would be typing these addresses so often.)

It's nice to see a fellow geek's name on Her Majesty's New Year Honours list, alongside the football and music stars, bureaucrats, and political cronies. His honour is to be made Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, one of the higher titles on the pecking order of "knighthoods". He is entitled to put "KBE" after his name, and since he's a British citizen (Her Majesty also gives these to non-subjects who contribute to the well-being of Britain) he can be referred to as "Sir Tim".

Berners-Lee definitely deserves this honour, not simply for creating the technology of the Web, but for declining to patent it and then freely licencing it to the world. So anyone can make a web browser or server without getting permission or paying a penny in royalties to anyone. If he hadn't done that, he'd probably be much richer, but we'd all be poorer from not having this technology universally available. The Web as we know it would be more like AOL: a closed, proprietary system.

He's also remained active as Director of the W3C, the organisation that works to develop open, public standards for new web technology (lest it be overtaken by proprietary enhancements which only work with, say, Microsoft's Internet Explorer). That ongoing care for his "baby" adds to his (no better word for it) nobility.

Hail, Sir Tim!