By Dawn Kawamoto
CNET News.com
July 16, 2004, 8:00 AM PT

Queen Elizabeth II dubbed Tim Berners-Lee a knight on Friday, in recognition of his contributions to the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee, in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, was dubbed a Knight Commander, the second highest rank of the Order of the British Empire. For Berners-Lee, a British citizen living in the United States, the knighthood marked the latest honor he has received since creating the protocols for the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.

"I am humbled by this great honor," Berners-Lee said. "The Web came about through an ongoing collaboration with my fellow investors and developers worldwide. Everyone in the Internet community should be recognized by this honor."

Berners-Lee first learned of his elevation to knighthood in December when he was informed his name was included on Buckingham Palace's new year honours list.

The hour-long ceremony on Friday, during which the Queen dubbed Berners-Lee a knight with a sword that belonged to her father King George VI, was the formal recognition of that honor.

Knighthood is just one of the many honors and awards that Berners-Lee has received for his efforts. Last month, the World Wide Web inventor was also honored with the Millennium Technology Prize from the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. And in 2002, Prince Philip awarded Berners-Lee the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts.

In addition to creating the protocols for the Internet, Berners-Lee serves as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a standards body. The W3C, an international organization, recently tackled two specifications for computer-voice interaction. One is VoiceXML 2.0, which is designed to improve the delivery of Web-based content to interactive voice response applications. And the other is the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification, which aims to convert an end user's responses to spoken prompts.