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:
- 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".
- 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 !
back to WWW5 main document.
WWW5 opening_session /
07-jun-96 (ra) /
reto ambühler
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