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conference, many people who had been interacting only by e-mail were meeting each other face-to-face for the first time. And for the first time people who were developing the Web were brought together with all sorts of people who were using it in all sorts of ways. The connections were electric. For example, there was Børre Ludvigsen, who had a home server that allowed people to visit his house, look at a cutaway model of it, see where the computers were in it, and browse his bookshelves. He had put his server on a special phone line provided by the Norwegian phone company as part of an experiment. He was talking with people who actually thought they could adapt his approach for health-care applications. The excitement, congeniality, and grassroots fervor for furthering the Web inspired the reporters there, overdoing it a little, to dub the meeting the "Woodstock of the Web."

In the span of one session in one of the meeting rooms, the agenda was laid down for HTML for the next few years—how to incorporate tables, math, and the handling of graphics and photographic images. Although anything on an Internet FTP server was available on the Web, HTTP had completely taken off as a more efficient alternative, but it needed a lot more optimization to keep up with ever-increasing demands to frequently fetch Web pages from a server in rapid succession, and pick up all the graphics embedded in a page. In a birds-of-a-feathter session, Dave Raggett proposed a "Virtual Reality Markup Language," an idea Mark Pesce picked up and ran with to start the whole community doing 3D on the Web and to define VRML.

The only time I felt a bit uneasy was when I gave the closing speech. I talked about several technical points, which was fine. I announced the upcoming consortium, which was fine. But then I finished by pointing out that, like scientists, people in the Web development community had to be ethically and morally aware of what they were doing. I thought this might be construed as a bit out of line by the geek side, but the people present were the