NASHVILLE, Tenn. — “Those were the days,” noted Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in describing what it was like at the advent of his most well-known achievement (to date), the World Wide Web.

“My job before the Web was to explain what it could do,” a “difficult job” then, noted Berners-Lee. Today, it’s just as difficult to explain what it was like before the Web, he joked.

“The Web is all about standards,” said Berners-Lee, citing parallels between the Web and NACS/PCATS standards for the convenience and petroleum retailing industry, although he joked that he could provide “great, in-depth knowledge about what I don’t know about your industry.”

But Berners-Lee gave attendees unique insight into what the advent of the Web was like, which USA Today cited yesterday as the most important innovation of the Internet age. Back in 1991, the Web could expect about 100 “hits” a day, which increased by a factor of 10 in the early years.

And, of course, those early sites, as much of a marvel as they were, were “horrible,” said Berners-Lee – text heavy, with bad music and poor mug-shot pictures and art designed by geeks, not artists. Plus, the wretched colors – purple lettering on teal backgrounds.

Still, the Web is “connected to humanity” and reflects its glory much more so that its ills. And the best is still to come, said Berners-Lee, citing two coming revolutions, the Semantic Web and the Ubiquitous Web. With the former, applications will all be united – GPS positioning will be connected to digital pictures and those connected to text so that everything can be organized into a concise informational package, allowing for a far more robust data collection, whether for work or fun. And with the Ubiquitous Web, i9nformation will be shared across devices, whether cell phones or computers or something yet to be invented.

“The Web is about data,” while these new applications “are about things,” stressed Berners-Lee, urging attendees to become involved with the work of the W3C.