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going global

People at LCS had installed Viola, and MIT was well into the Web. The name "www.mit.edu" was taken very early on by a student computing club, so "web.mit.edu" would become and remain the name of MIT's main server. At LCS, I described the ideas behind the Web to a select group of individuals in the fifth-floor auditorium. Some of the researchers and administrators wondered a bit why I was there. I was trying to see how this creation, which was really a matter of engineering, fit in from the point of view of the research community, what the Web could learn from researchers in the field, and why it hadn't happened before.

At the IETF meeting I held my birds-of-a-feather session to investigate forming a working group to standardize the URI spec, as Joyce Reynolds had suggested. We met in a small room at the Hyatt Hotel. I presented the idea of a universal document identifier—my initial name for it—and said I was interested in it being adopted as an Internet standard. A number of things went less than smoothly. The open discussion was great. I felt very much in the minority. There was another minority who seemed to resent me as an intruding newcomer.

Even though I was asking for only a piece of the Web to be standardized, there was a strong reaction against the "arrogance" of calling something a universal document identifier. How could I be so presumptuous as to define my creation as "universal"? If I wanted the UDI addresses to be standardized, then the name "uniform document identifiers" would certainly suffice. I sensed an immediate and strong force among the people there. They were trying to confine the Web to some kind of tidy box: Nothing could be universal. Others viewed the IETF as a place where something universal might be created, but that something was not going to be the Web. Those tensions would continue through that IETF meeting and subsequent ones. Some people wanted to integrate the Web with other information systems, which directly begged the point, because the Web was defined to be the integration of all information systems.