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weaving the web

I did not want to form a standards body per se, but some kind of organization that could help developers of servers and browsers reach consensus on how the Web should operate. With Mosaic picking up the ball and running single-handedly for the goal line, and more and more gopher users considering the Web, evidence was mounting that “the Web” could splinter into various factions—some commercial, some academic; some free, some not. This would defeat the very purpose of the Web: to be a single, universal, accessible hypertext medium for sharing information.

I talked to people at CERN about starting some kind of consortium. I also swapped e-mails with Michael Dertouzos at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. Michael seemed very receptive to the idea. A frequent visitor to Europe and his native Greece, he arranged to meet me in Zurich on February 1, 1994.

I took the train from Geneva to Zurich not knowing quite what Michael wanted, nor what I did. We met at a pleasant café in the old town, and over some characteristic Zurich-style veal and Rösti, we ended up sketching plans for the top levels of a consortium. We both returned to our homes to mull over our ideas.

It seemed more than a bit serendipitous that the first WWW Wizards Workshop was scheduled to be held only a month or so later … in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just a few blocks from MIT. It had been set up by Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Associates, who again quietly managed to gather the flock.

O'Reilly had just published Ed Krol's book Whole Earth Internet Catalog, which was really the first book that made all this Internet stuff accessible to the public. When I had proofread it, on the train in Chicago going to meet Tom Bruce, the World Wide Web occupied just one chapter; the rest was about how to use all the various Internet protocols such as FTP and telnet and so on. But the traffic on the Web was increasing fast, and NCSA had just released working versions of the Mosaic browser for Unix, Win-