Re: Two Webs?

Ryan Grant (rgrant@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Wed, 20 Jul 1994 02:49:40 +0200

>From: Brandon Plewe <PLEWE@plewe.cit.buffalo.edu>

>Are we seeing the beginnings of a rift in the WWW?

I am here to tell you that (as Eric said), I do not perceive NCSA breaking
away. NCSA depends on the open and collaborative definitions of the current
protocols. (i.e. We are currently making revisions to support HTML 2.0)

> I sometimes get the impression that some hold NCSA in about as high regard
> as Microsoft ("they got us where we are today, but we resent their
> popularity and arrogance").

I hope not - what would motivate the negative attitudes? There is no
"what NCSA says" for the "Mosaic-ites" to follow.

>The renaming of NCSA's Mosaic conference to "The Second International WWW
>Conference-Mosaic and the Web" and its co-sponsorship by CERN is promising,
>but why is NCSA not involved with W3O? Or is it?

The conference was originally designed to be an introduction to Mosaic,
with tech-support-like workshops. It was not designed to compete with the
Geneva conference and propose competing standards. I'm not involved in
any of the planning, but it sounds like it will be a bit broader now.

I'm not aware of W3O doing anything yet, but NCSA will be involved
in the standards discussed there as soon as we hear about it.

I think the comments by Eric and Tim from Spyglass, and Chris from Spry
should also help a great deal in clarifying this issue.

this is things as I see them,
- Ryan Grant
NCSA Mosaic for Windows Development
rgrant@ncsa.uiuc.edu