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<title>WWW '94 Trip Report by Dan Connolly</title>
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<h1>WWW '94 Trip Report</h1>
<address>
<a href="http://www.hal.com/~connolly/index.html">Daniel W. Connolly</a><br>
connolly@hal.com<br>
trip-report.html,v 1.5 1994/06/03 17:25:29 connolly Exp<br>
$Id: trip-report.html,v 1.2 2006/10/11 05:49:42 connolly Exp $<br>
</address>

<h2 id="bg">Background</h2>

<p> <em>The First International World-Wide Web Conference</em> was
    held in Geneva, Switzerland, May 25-28, 1994. For more background
    information, see <A HREF="http://www1.cern.ch/WWW94/Welcome.html">
    the WWW '94 web page at CERN</a>.


<h2 id="tue">Tuesday</h2>

<p> <a href="tuesday.html">Arrival, meeting with folks at CERN</a>

<hr>

<h2 id="wed">Wednesday Morning</h2>


<hr>
<H3 id="chaum"><em>Keynote Address</em> David Chaum, DigiCash</h3>

<p> The keynote address was given by David Chaum from DigiCash. It was
    an incredible eye-opener. I'll summarize his talk with an excerpt
    from an article he wrote:

<blockquote>

<p> The growing amounts of information that different organizations
    collect about a person can be linked because all of them use the
    same key--tin the U.S. the social security number--to identify the
    individual in question. This identifier-based approach perforce
    trades off security against individual liberties. The more
    information that organizations have (whether the intent is to
    protect them from fraud or simply to target marketing efforts),
    the less privacy and control people retain.

<p> Over the past eight years, my colleages and I at CWI (the Dutch
    nationally funded Center for Methematics and Computer Science in
    Amsterdam) have developed a new approach, based on fundamental
    theoretical and practical advances in cryptography, that makes
    this trade-off unnecessary. Transactions employing these
    techniques avoid the possiblity of fraud while maintaining the
    privacy of those who use them.

  <address>David Chaum<br>
  <cite>Achieving Electronic Privacy</cite><br>
  Scientific American, August 1992, pp. 96-101
  </address>

</blockquote>

<p> His remarks colored many discussions throughout the conference. In
    the closing plenary panel, it was largely agreed that the Web
    needs a sort of "Bill of Rights" to protect the rights of citizens
    in the developing digital age.

<hr>
<h3 id="hardin"><em>The State of the Web</em> Joseph Hardin, NCSA</h3>

<p> Mr. Harding had quite an impressive collection of graphs of
    statistical evidence to support the conclusion: <strong>The Web is
    big, and it's growing exponentially.</strong> Any data that were
    inconsistent with exponential growth could be attributed to
    phenomena such as server crashes, national holidays, etc.

<p> With regard to Mosaic, he mentioned some collaboration between
    NCSA, Adobe, and other parties on an API for interactions between
    "applets" on the client side (i.e. desktop).

<p> It was an interesting talk, and I don't have time to do it justice
    here, but I will include a list of issues from his slides:

<dl>
<dt>Global
<dd><ul>
  <li>Indexing
  <li>Searching
  <li>Knowledge Daemonry
  </ul>

<dt>Personal
<dd><ul>
  <li>Publishing
  <li>Agentry
  </ul>
</dl>


<hr>
<h3 id="tbl"><em>The Future of the Web</em> Tim Berners-Lee, CERN</h3>

<h4 id="semweb">The Web as a Knowledge Base</h4>

<p> Currently, links between nodes on the web are constructed by the
    author for the use of the reader, but they convey little
    information to the machine that would allow it to do automated
    indexing or searching, or to make inferences.

<p> There has long been a notion of "typed links" in the web software
    architecture, but it has not been deployed in
    practice. Relatively modest applications of this concept include
    links that associate a stylesheet with a document, or links that
    aggregate several nodes in a collection for the purpose or
    printing the aggregate document.

<h4 id="collab">Collaboration</h4>

<p> The success of Mosaic has brought the capability to "surf" the web
    to a huge user community. But to this community, the web is
    largely read-only.

<p> Immediately, we can see that tools for distributed maintenance of
    the web would make life easier for information providers. But more
    importantly, the deployment of technology like Mosaic creates
    class distinctions in the web community: the community as a whole
    has grown tremendously, but the information providers remain a
    privileged minority, and if we are not careful, the views of that
    minority may misrepresent the actual views of the community that
    they represent.

<p> Contrast this with USENET, where every newsreader has a "post"
    feature, which can creates an article with the same readership as
    the original article. This fosters free, open, democratic debate.

<p> The Web was conceived as such a democratic forum, and it is only
    due to lack of resources that collaborative tools have not been
    deployed.


<h4 id="vr">The Web and Virtual Reality</h4>

<p> Tim Berners-Lee sees the future of the web as one in which the
    objects in the web represent objects in the real world such that a
    house-object might have an "owner" link to a person-object, such
    that changing that link to point to a different person-object has
    the effect of transferring legal ownership of the house between
    those persons. Obviously there are a range of security issues. But
    commerce on the web is coming, and other applications of virtual
    reality will follow.


<h4 id="w3-org">W3O</h4>

<p> The funding is not completely in place, and so to make a big
    announcement about W3O would be to steal the thunder of the
    upcoming announcement by the funding agencies. So W3O has not been
    formally announced.

<p> But there were enough questions about what organization would
    carry the torch for WWW that Tim got permission from the powers
    that be to make some information available.

<p> W3O will be an international consortium with two principal sites:
    one at MIT to oversee U.S. operations, and one at CERN to oversee
    European operations. The intent is that it will operate like the X
    Consortium: companies will pay a fee to be members, and in return,
    they'll get early access to the technology. The technical team at
    W3O will act as editors of the specifications, and will develop
    reference implementations. Contribution, discussion, and
    collaboration will be invited and encouraged.


<hr>

<h2 id="wed">Wednesday Afternoon</h2>


<hr>
<h3 id="wwwig">WWWIG Meeting (Take One)</h3>

<p> This meeting was arranged rather haphazardly, and there were some
    important players missing. We met again on Thursday, but to
    summarize...

<p> I presented some <a href="wwwig-slides.html">slides</a> that a
    couple OLIAS project managers and I put together.

<p> I explained that I began working on the HTML specification when I
    was in the documentation tools group at <a
    href="http://www.convex.com/">Convex Computer Corp.</a> I was out
    of the loop for a year, but now I am on the <a
    href="http://www.hal.com/products/sw/olias/index.html">OLIAS
    project at HaL Software Systems</a>, where once again, I am
    grappling with the issues of delivering high quality products that
    interoperate with WWW, which is a moving target.

<p> Recently, I began soliciting support for vendor-supported
    specifications for WWW technologies. Since it appears that W3O
    will handle these issues in the long term, I have narrowed my
    focus to achieving interoperability among products supporting HTML
    in the upcoming months.

<p> We discussed some of <a href="html-issues.html">the outstanding issues</a>.

<p> The vendors showing support at this meeting include:

<dl>

<dt> HaL Software Systems

<dd> A future release of <a
     href="http://www.hal.com/products/sw/olias/index.html">OLIAS</a>,
     an SGML document browser by HaL Software Systems, will support
     browsing HTML documents from web servers. We also develop SGML
     document development tools, including a FrameMaker gateway. We
     may add HTML support to these tools in a future release.

<dt> <a href="http://www.spyglass.com/">Spyglass</a>

<dd> Erik W. Sink <code>&lt;esink@spyglass.com&gt;</code> was very
     open in representing his company's support for WWW: the HTML
     specifcation effort, WWWLibrary development, etc.

<dt> <a href="http://www.sco.com/">SCO</a> and <a
     href="http://www.sco.com/IXI"> IXI</a>

<dd> Murray Malone <code>&lt;murray@sco.com&gt;</code> from the
     technical publications department of SCO represented his
     company's interest in this effort.

<dt> <a href="http://www.sun.com/smli/index.html">Sun Microsystems
     Laboratories, Inc.</a>

<dd> I have a card from Gary R. Adams
     <code>&lt;gary.adams@east.sun.com&gt;</code>. In all the rush, I
     seem to have forgotten the details of our discussions.

</dl>

<hr>
<h3 id="sgml">Workshop: <em>The Role of SGML in WWW</em></h3>

<p> See also: <a href="http://tyr.let.rug.nl/~bert/SGML.html">the call
    for participation</a>, <a
    href="http://www.let.rug.nl/SGML-verslag.html">a summary by Bert
    Bos</a>.

<p> Bert Bos moderated this discussion about how SGML plays in WWW.
    The attendees were mostly bigtime SGML publishers that were
    interested in delivering their wares online. Intellectual property
    rights and mechanisms and HTML+ features were the hot topics,
    along with stylesheets, Adobe PDF, and legacy documents.

<hr>
<h3 id="hackers">WWW Hacker's Dinner</h3>

<p> Tim Berners-Lee organized a sort of pizza-dinner and brainstorming
    session for Wednesday evening, but it turned out to be a casual
    chat out in the courtyard over a few beers.

<p> Rather than hashing over technical ideas, mostly we got to know
    each other a little better. To (mis)use a new term from this
    conference, we did some "social engineering."

<hr>
<h2 id="thu-am">Thursday Morning</h2>
<hr>

<h3 id="devrc"><a
href="http://cui_www.unige.ch/WWW94/Workshops/workshop.list.html#wwwDev">
Development Priorities </a> Robert Cailliau</h3>

<p> The object of the game was to get a list of needed future
    developments, and prioritize them. We managed to come up with a
    list, but it seemed pointless to order them. Tim Berners-Lee put
    the list online in in <a
    href="http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/WorkingNotes/WWW94/DevPriBOF.html">
    his notes</a>.

<hr>
<h2 id="thu-pm">Thursday Afternoon</h2>
<hr>

<h3 id="wwwig2">WWWIG Meeting (Take Two)</h3>

<p> This time, the vendors represented were:

<dl>

<dt> NCSA

<dd> Joseph Hardin

<dt> SoftQuad

<dd> Yuri Rubinski

<dt> OCLC

<dd> Stu Wiebel

<dt> HaL

<dd> Joseph Schneider

<dt> Spyglass

<dd> Eric Sink

<dt> CERN

<dd> Tim Berners-Lee

</dl>

<p> We started out talking about the HTML spec document that I have
    been working on, but twice we wandered off and started talking
    about the WWWLibrary code.

<p> Mr. Harding suggested setting up a task force to coordinate
    development of the code -- distributing diffs, avoiding duplicated
    work, etc. Eric Sink, myself, Ari Luotonen, Henrik Frystyk, and
    some folks from NCSA were nominated. I'm not sure what's next for
    that group.

<p> There was some discussion about long-term maintenance issues. Tim
    explained the status of W3O, and where he thinks it's headed.

<p> Yuri Rubinski suggested that the HTML spec could be published as
    an SGML Open technical report. This looks like a good idea. We
    form a technical committee, review the document, and publish it.
    The committee retains editorial and intellectual property control
    over the document.

<p> The document will be available for review on the web through
    CERN's server. I gave a pointer to the copy on the HaL server, but
    that's only temporary. We'll probably spin an IETF draft or two in
    the mean-time too.

<hr>

<h3 id="boat">Dinner On the Boat</h3>

<hr>
<h2 id="fri-am">Friday Morning</h2>
<hr>

<h3 id="html-plus">HTML+ Workshop Dave Ragget</h3>

<p> This was a long one, with lots of spicy discussion.

<p> One interesting development is that right now, HTML is compatible
    with disabled-access publishing techniques; i.e. blind people can
    read HTML documents. We must be careful that we don't lose this
    feature by adding too many visual presentation features to HTML.

<p> More discussion topics that I don't have time to expand on...

<ul>
<li> Balance simplicity with features in HTML/HTML+

<li> Compound document architecture

<li> Math -- typography and semantics

<li> <a href="htmlplus-maloney.html">HTML interoperability issue chart</a>
</ul>

<hr>
<h2 id="fri-pm">Friday Afternoon</h2>
<hr>

<h3 id="panel">Plenary Panel</h3>

<p> See also: <a
    href="http://www1.cern.ch/WWW94/Images/ClosingPanel/list.html"> CERN's
    collection of photos of the panel</a>

<p> Each of the panelists was asked to briefly discuss the most
    important future developments on the Web.

<ul>

<li>"Rick" Channing
Rodgers, National Library of Medecine

<li> Dave Raggett, HP Labs

<li> Kevin Altis, Intel

<li> Dan Connolly, HaL Software

<li> Tim Berners-Lee, CERN

<li> Robert Cailliau, CERN

<li> Dr. Joseph Hardin, NCSA

<li> Dr. Yuri Rubinsky of SoftQuad

<li> Dr. Bipin Desai

<li> Børre Ludvigsen, the man with the home on the Web

</ul>

<p> The same issues came up in several of the speaker's discussions:

<ul>
<li> Resource discovery: how will users navigate this vast body of
     information? What systems will we deploy to make it manageable?

<li> Automated Agents: active objects will represent users in
     everything from conducting complex queries to negociating the
     purchase of information objects and even physical objects.

<li> "Bill of Rights" for the information age: what ground-rules must
     we establish to prevent "data facism" and absolute control of
     this new medium by powerful commercial entities?

<li> Collaboration: right now the web is read-only for the vast
     majority of the user community. In order to build a democratic
     digital society, everyone must be able to make their views known.

<li> Commercialization of the net: it's inevitable. What can we do to
     ensure that it is a win-win situation?

</ul>