WWW94: conclusions and comments

• first of all, i'd like to thank Robert Cailliau and his crew at CERN for organizing this very successful event, it was well organized.

• i heard of tools and methods i didn't know that they exist.

• i met people who deal with the same problems and i can keep in touch with.

• i'm now aware of many problems, that i have a chance to look at while we are in the very beginning of setting up WWW servers and they are relatively small rather then run into them when they are already big and difficult to solve. this includes setting up a style guide, defining responsibilities, choosing the appropriate platforms and software and - most important - the problem of how can people find the information they are looking for ("indexing", "virtual libraries", etc.).

• my major concern is the maintainability of the software. on one hand, there are many different hardware and software platforms (from PCs and MACs to workstations and mainframes running UNIX, OpenVMS or whatever). on the other hand, at many different places in the world, people are developing various extensions to any software or protocol involved with WWW. so it is impossible to keep track of and - even more important - to integrate them into one "standard" server or client.
  so what happens if i want the multilingual support from the guy in japan (developed under UNIX) and the caching algorithm from the guy in the states (developed under Windows NT) on my server running on a VAX ?
  i belief some standardization is desperately needed and i hope the new "WWW organization" will be able to help in this area soon ...