The calm before the snow

"This is going to be the last World-Wide Web conference before the Men in Suits take over," grumbled the young engineer from a major US hardware company. "IBM and Microsoft and Netscape and Sun will all be saying 'we're really excited' about the Web, which means they're excited about making profits from other people's ideas.

"But never mind," he brightened up. "We'll just invent something more interesting. And in two years' time... But this time, for the first time, I've brought a button-down shirt."

At the first World-Wide Web conference, Tim Berners-Lee was a British academic who happened to have been co-inventor of a neat internet toy called the Web. By the fifth, this week, he is a harassed-looking resident of Massachussetts, pursued by photographers and bankers. What does he make of the Men in Suits prediction? "I wonder!"

Corporation

"Corporation C is a merchant bank," said the man from IBM's Notes division, "with divisions in many countries, and a mixture of Macs, Windows 3.1 and Windows NT machines on traders' desks..." Twenty people were listening to his exposition of how a fusion between Web techniques and the ex-Lotus Notes system could be the answer for a company wanting to distribute information to selected employees. This internal-communications technology, dubbed the Intranet, is supposed, according to Bill Gates too, to be the big issue for the Internet this year. The display screen was enormous, the hall was comfortable, there hadn't been any wine with lunch, and the twenty were very, very quiet.

Impassioned librarians

In a small and stuffy basement room, thirty people packed themselves round an old-fashioned overhead projector to argue about how the World-Wide Web can become more than just an English-Language Web. The level of erudition was astonishing: American software engineers who speak French, discussing the details of the different ways the Devanagri script is used to write Hindi and to write other languages, for example.

On the one hand, these people expressed a commitment in principle to facilitating communication among people in their own languages. On the other, they face immediate commercial needs: Sun, for example, must document its Solaris operating system in seven languages and is committed to twenty more. To do so without getting tangled in a web of string-and-chewing-gum ad-hoc solutions requires that level of linguistic erudition, plus the skills of a librarian and a data analyst.

Raining cats OR dogs

Too much erudition is dangerous, if experts assume that users share it. "We told our test subjects they had the following pets: cats, and dogs," a man from Sun told an audience of 200 learning about computer interface design in a very comfortable lecture theatre. "'Find information on your pets,' we told them. Even experienced programmers asked the computer to search for 'cats AND dogs', and they were very suprised that nothing came back... Because it was an experiment, and they knew there was probably information in the system, they carried on trying all sorts of things, but in real life they'd probably have given up." Databases need to be told to search for "cats OR dogs".

Virtually at home in cyberspace

In another basement room, a bunch of PhD students were inventing one next, more interesting thing. Many of them have spent far too much of their time in the on-line chat environments called MOOs. There, they "build" themselves "homes" -- but if you are invited to visit, you are restricted to things like typing "look" and reading a textual description. If MOOs could be integrated with the visual environment of the World-Wide Web, or with "virtual reality"...

"Why do Web browser programs only have 'forward' and 'back' buttons? Why not 'deeper' and 'through'?" was a typical question, among the deeply technical ones. "If we represent a typical Web page as a corridor, with doors that link to other pages, what does a search engine look like?" And an almost revivalist conclusion: "We have to get back to the original idea of the Web, as something that people use to communicate in real time." The two leading lights here were not only in their 20s, and not only based at Nottingham University (as in, Nottingham England), but female.

This was just the beginning of the event. Yesterday [Wednesday 7 May], the trade-show part opened, with its inevitable heavy snowfall of promotion.