Bradley K. Sherman WWW'94 Trip Report

Bradley K. Sherman's WWW'94 Trip Report

I attended The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web (WWW'94) which was held at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, 24-27 May. I was co-organizer of the Biology Workshop at the meeting along with Reinhard Doelz and Peter Murray-Rust. About 15 people attended the Workshop. 380 attended the conference and I am told that about 200 were turned away due to space limitations. Reinhard Doelz prepared a Biology Workshop report . I demo'ed the various Plant Genome Database offerings at the Biology Workshop and also took some pictures . Note that there is a discussion now in the bionet.general BIONET electronic conference about the establishment of a new conference dedicated to biology on the web. This is an outgrowth of the conference workshop.

Here is an executive summary of topics that seemed to dominate the conference:

Authoring tools for generating paper and HTML documents from a single source.
Proxy servers: these allow WWW access from behind a firewall, can speed up access, and allow for smaller clients (important in Windows world, esp.).
Secure transactions using various cryptographic techniques (I must add that nearly everyone I spoke to used HTML forms to register for the conference even though it required sending a Credit Card number in cleartext --including me-- and we all knew better).
How to add state to servers --this allow, e.g. the results of a previous query to be fodder for a current query.
An international WWW organization is going to be formed.
The need for a WWW Bill of Rights to prevent commercial or state encroachment.
The next meeting is the Second International WWW Conference '94: Mosaic and the Web, Chicago, October 17-19.

If you'd like to look at some pictures here are The opening session , and the closing plenary panel .

I also took a few pictures of Geneva , Montreaux, and Berne which I hope to annotate soon.

Pictures are delivered at 56 kilobits/second.

CERN and the WWW'94 organizers are providing a list of other trip reports that you might wish to peruse.

Bradley K. Sherman