Mixed Messages at WWW6
By Lincoln D. Stein
I've just returned from the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, where the theme was "Everyone, Everything, Connected." I carried back with me a neat coffee mug, a T-shirt, and a lot to ponder.
The International WWW Conference is the oldest of the Web conferences, a gathering ground for the geeks, nerds, and technoheads of the Web revolution, a place where technical papers on caching algorithms, electronic payment systems, and Web search engines replace the slick industry presentations one sees at other Web conferences. (An entire session was devoted to techniques for counting page hits!) In this academic atmosphere, WWW Consortium members debate standards, and avid amateurs assemble in impromptu "Birds of a Feather" meetings to share their technical know-how.
In the past I've found this type of meeting inspirational -- its message is that a handful of visionary academics and amateurs, working together across the Internet, have created an entity that changed the face of the software industry and caught even such megaliths as Microsoft off guard. Examples aren't hard to find: Just think about Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen.
Here's an excerpt from a position piece that I wrote for the System Administration Networking and Security (SANS) '96 conference. After decrying certain industry leaders' habit of "enhancing" the HTML and HTTP standards in ways that gave their proprietary browsers an edge, I went on to say:
I think in the end the amateurs will win the day.
