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ance between competing demands on developers' time. But it was also true that most were more excited' about putting fancy display features into the browsers—multimedia, different colors and fonts—which took much less work and created much more buzz among users. And Marc, more than anyone, appeared interested in responding to users' wants.

I sensed other tensions as well. There was a huge difference in style among the three men, and each seemed to be thinking separately rather than as a team. Eric, the staffer, was quiet. Marc, the student, gave the appearance that he thought of this meeting as a poker game. Hardin was very academic, the consummate professor in a tweed jacket. He was interested in the social implications of the Web as well as the technology, and in sociological studies of the Web. For him Mosaic was a sequel to a project NCSA already had, a multimedia hypertext system called Collage.

To add to my consternation, the NCSA public-relations department was also pushing Mosaic. It wasn't long before the New York Times ran an article picturing Hardin and Larry Smarr, the head of NCSA, (not Marc and Eric!) sitting side by side at terminals running the Mosaic browser. Once again, the focus was on Mosaic, as if it were the Web. There was little mention of other browsers, or even the rest of the world's effort to create servers. The media, which didn't take the time to investigate deeper, started to portray Mosaic as if it were equivalent to the Web.

I returned to CERN uneasy about the decidedly peremptory undertones behind NCSA's promotion of Mosaic. NCSA quickly started other projects to get Mosaic onto PCs running Windows, and onto Macintoshes.

The rise of different browsers made me think once again about standardization. The IETF route didn't seem to be working. I thought' that perhaps a different model would. I got more enthused about the idea during a seminar at Newcastle University in my

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