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- going global

arbitrary decision (like which punctuation characters to use) that I had already made, and changing it would only mean that millions of Web browsers and existing links would have to be changed. After months of rather uncontrolled arguing in the IETF, it seemed that they had to take either all of the Web, or none of it. In the end I wrote a specification on how URIs were used on the Web, and issued it to the IETF community as an informational "Request for Comment 1630." While hurried and with a few mistakes, it was a foothold for future progress. The whole affair would also have gone more smoothly had I been more forceful about the points on which I was prepared to negotiate and those on which I was not.

My stay at LCS had been more inspiring, and the same was true when I went to Xerox PARC. Being security conscious, PARC had many experimental servers available internally, protected behind a firewall built into their system that prevented outsiders from illegally gaining electronic access. There was a special way of getting a connection from inside to outside. They were not using Viola because it had to be compiled with special code to make this connection, so the first thing I did on arrival was to do that.

I also visited other important actors in the Web world while in the San Francisco area. When going to PARC I would bike in every day past SLAC. I stopped in to see Paul Kunz and Louise Addis, early promoters and implementers of the Web. I also got together with Pei Wei, who was still at U.C. Berkeley. Although Viola was attracting some attention, the difficulty in installing it limited its appeal. I met Pei at a café outside San Francisco to try to persuade him to make installation easier, and to give editing power to his browser as well—still my ideal. But Pei's interest was always in Viola as a computer language; he saw the Web as just one application of it. I tried to encourage but not push. After all, Viola was broadening the Web's reach tremendously. Part of my reason to meet him was simply to say, in person, "Thank you, well done."