(Tea from 3:45p)

Abstract:
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a "vague, but exciting" proposal for a hypertext-based information management system. That proposal eventually became the World Wide Web, a system that rapidly outgrew the competition, moved beyond the altruistic goals of its creator, and today dominates the Internet. Kimberly Blessing, a twenty-year veteran of the Web, will recap her recent trip to CERN, birthplace of the World Wide Web, as a part of the team restoring the line mode browser at info.cern.ch . In this talk she will offer a retrospective of the lessons learned during those early days into a modern context for the next generation of computer scientists and software engineers.

Bio: Kimberly Blessing is the Director of Web Development and Technology Consulting at Think Brownstone, a user experience consulting firm in Conshohocken, PA. She received a BA in Computer Science at BMC and a MS in CS at George Washington University. Kimberly added the first graphics to www.brynmawr.edu in the mid-90s and went on to work in web development and leadership roles at AOL, PayPal/eBay, and Comcast before joining Think Brownstone. She was a member of the Web Standards Project for eight years, has served on the W3C working groups for HTML and CSS, and has contributed to two books on web development. She has spoken at numerous industry events around the world and is most proud of having been able to teach a web development course at Bryn Mawr in 2008 and 2011.

Co-Sponsored by Department of Computer Science at Bryn Mawr College and Center for Science of Information (An NSF Science & Technology Center)