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weaving the web

Pei's unassuming demeanor and lack of arrogance about his ideas were remarkable given his product, which was great. When I congratulated him and told him that further development would make Viola the flagship of Web browsers, Pei smiled, but he would reserve his program as his own research tool. He would go on to join the Digital Media group at O'Reilly Associates in Sebastopol, California, run by Dale Dougherty, one of the early Web champions, which was creating various Internet products. He used Viola to demonstrate what online products could look like using different styles.

Because the installation process was a little too complex, Viola was destined to be eclipsed by other browsers to come. Indeed, there was already competition between Web browsers. While Erwise and ViolaWWW competed as browsers for the X Window system on Unix, Tony Johnson at SLAC entered the fray. A physicist, he had developed another browser for X called Midas, partly because he liked to see a program written well, and partly because in his project he wanted to use the Web to disseminate his information, and wanted a browser he could control. He used a nice conceptual model, the programming was very clean, and it allowed him, for example, to import images in a very flexible way.

I met Tony in his office at SLAC. Although he gave presentations around SLAC about Midas, and used it himself, he was as reluctant as Pei or the Erwise group to join in my effort at CERN, even though it would probably provide extra resources. Tony was and is first and foremost a physicist, and he didn't like the idea of supporting Midas for a group any wider than that of his colleagues.

The month I was spending in California was coming to a close, and soon my family and I would have to return to Geneva. But I could not go back without making one more stop, which I knew would be perhaps the greatest treat of the summer. Ted Nelson, who had conceived Xanadu twenty-five years earlier, lived close by, and I had to meet him.