WWW5: opening session

welcome address:

jean-françois abramatic from INRIA opened the 5th World Wide Web conference. he remembered how it was back in december 95, when he announced "his" conference in boston:

1. in the closing session of the 4th WWW conference, robert metcalfe, vice president of technology from international data group, predicted: "the Web will collapse during 1996".
2. the second "Web" he was concerned with, had already collapsed: the metro in paris was on strike at that time.

so he was about to manage a conference about something that is going to collapse in a city whose public transportation system had already collapsed ... but i think everyone will agree, he did a great job !

conference introduction:

bob hopgood from SLAC announced the 6th World Wide Web conference which will take place in santa clara, california from april 7 to april 12 1997.

tribute to yuri rubinsky:

yuri rubinsky, a founder of apple and now president of SoftQuad, also a member of the "International World Wide Web Conference Committee" (IW3C2), died in january 1996. he was a publisher since he was ten years old and he was acknowledged as THE SGML guru. a friend and fellow worker at SoftQuad recalled some special moments in yuri rubinsky's life in a very touching way. the SGML and the Web community has lost a very special member and we shall always remember him.

keynote presentations:

jean-jacques damlamian from france télécom talked about Web-based services. france télécom has introduced the minitel many years ago. there is now an evolution from minitel to the Internet. jean-jacques envisions a "superphone", a phone with a screen to have even faster access to more information. the telecom companies need to "share the cake with others", as he said. to do so, it is necessary to enlarge "the cake".
the Internet supports small and young companies with its services. until now, these services were for free, but this will change, he said.

the main message from john r. patrick from IBM was "everything is changing". to him, things that will or have to change are:

• "local markets will become global markets." when people or companies start to do business on the Internet, the physical location of the company does no longer matter. for example, it used to be important for a bank to have a location at the wall street in new york. but for a bank that does business mainly on the Internet, it is reachable from any place in the world, regardless of its location.

• "TCP/IP will be everywhere." even digital, IBM and Microsoft have learned that TCP/IP is THE NETWORK PROTOCOL, regardless of some of its obvious weaknesses (this is my comment to his quote).

• "security is not a problem, it is an opportunity." i found this an interesting statement, and i think i agree. today, if you pay your diner at a restaurant, the waitress or waiter usually takes your credit card and disappears. she or he will eventually come back with the card and some paper to sign. but what happened in the meantime ?
  in the near future, if you do business on the Internet, the company from whom you buy some goods or services may never see you and even important, may never receive your credit card number. when you buy something, the order will be transferred to the seller and at the same time, the information that you are paying with your credit card will be sent to the credit card company. the later will verify your transaction and confirm to the seller if that transaction is ok or not. if all these data exchanges are done with reasonable security (data encryption, authentication of the sender and the receiver), this kind of business provides probably more privacy and is more secure than what we have today.

• "people will have a Web break instead of a smoke break." of course, this is the statement i liked best. but i guess john was not so much concerned with your health, but what he was trying to say is: the Internet is not only good for business, it is also a lot of fun. he conducted a guided tour through the Web and showed some of his most favorite Web sites. it is amazing, what's out there !

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