I remember his AAAI '07 talk where he laid into the audience for changing and reusing URLs. It made me really want to see this world he was imagining where millions of people using the web every which way agree to universally abide by a rule that makes their life a lot harder but makes it easier to reason about algorithms on the Web.

Btw, I don't think this or failure of semantic web reflect badly on TBL. He is in a rare class of folks, along with Stallman, who can leave a bigger dent in the world while missing their ideals by a mile than most of is could if we got everything we wanted.

Oh, I'm certainly not going to be very critical of Sir Tim! Along with the obvious reasons, I believe he coined the read/write web term and was a strong advocate of users being creators as well as consumers. And TBH, while it's fairly obvious today that classification and discovery has to happen largely organically if only because of the scale of the Web, thinking in terms of formal schemes is a pretty natural bias for someone of TBL's background to have.

My main point was that this wasn't just some fantasy of out-to-lunch bureaucrats.