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weaving the web

As a good software engineer, I wanted to standardize separately each of the three specifications central to the Web: the URI addressing scheme, the HTTP protocol by which computers talked to each other, and the HTML format for hypertext documents. The most fundamental of these was the URI spec.

The next meeting of the IETF was in March 1992 in San Diego, and I went to see how things worked, and how to start a working group. The answer came from Joyce Reynolds, who oversaw one area within the IETF. She said I had to first hold a "birds-of-a-feather" session to discuss whether there should be a working group. If there was consensus, people at the session could draw up a charter for a working group to begin at the next IETF meeting. The working group could edit a specification and take it through to a standard. The subsequent meeting would be held in July in Boston.

IETF meetings were characterized by people in T-shirts and jeans, and at times no footwear. They would meet in different small rooms and talk excitedly. The networking, of course, was paramount. Compared to Geneva in March, it was a pleasure for me to sit with folks outdoors in sunny, warm San Diego.

One day over coffee I was seated at a white metal table out in the open air, chatting with Larry Massinter from Xerox PARC and Karen Sollins, who had been a student of Dave Clark, the professor at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science who was very involved with the design of the TCP protocol that had made possible practical use of the Internet. Karen had stayed on at MIT to pursue a project called the Infomesh, to create ways computers could exchange hints to each other about where to find documents they were both interested in.

Larry and Karen asked me what I was doing next. I told them I was considering going on sabbatical. I had been at CERN seven years, and while there was no concept of a sabbatical at CERN, I felt I needed a break and some new perspective. I needed to think about where to take myself and the Web. After I returned