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weaving the web

It was run by Ian Ritchie of Owl, whom I had tried to convince four years earlier to develop a Web browser as part of Owl's hypertext product, Guide. It was here that I saw Doug Engelbart show the video of his original NLS system. Despite the Web's rise, the SGML community was still criticizing HTML as an inferior subset, and proposing that the Web rapidly adopt all of SGML. Others felt that HTML should be disconnected from the ungainly SGML world and kept clean and simple.

Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Associates, who had gathered the early Web creators at the first Wizards workshop and other meetings, saw a third alternative. After one session at the conference, a bunch of us adjourned to a local pub. As we were sitting around on stools nursing our beer glasses, Dale started telling everyone that, in essence, the SGML community was passé and that HTML would end up stronger. He felt we didn't have to accept the SGML world wholesale, or ignore it. Quietly, with a smile, Dale began saying, "We can change it." He kept repeating the phrase, like a mantra. "We can change it."

Right then and there, fixing SGML was put on the agenda. For the HTML community, the controversy quickly became a huge turn-on. It got them going. And many in the documentation community, also fed up with aspects of SGML, sympathized.

Compared with all the drama taking place in the forming of Web companies, this controversy may have seemed like an esoteric technical point. But the Jim Clarks and Bill Gateses would have no big business decisions to make unless specific decisions like the relationship of HTML to SGML were sorted out. Businesspeople and marketers who thought they were "driving" the Web would have had nothing to drive.

In October 1994, Netscape released the first version of its browser, dubbed Mozilla. It was a "beta" or test version, released so people on the Net would try it and send suggestions for improvements. As he had with Mosaic, Andreessen pumped out messages about Mozilla over the newsgroups, and users snapped it up.