Wednesday 13th - Papers (Day 2)

ednesday marked the second day of papers and, soon though it seemed, the closing session. As with yesterday, the day started with Birds of a Feather sessions in the (very) early morning, followed by multiple parallel sessions of papers throughout the day.

Closing the conference

The main wrap up keynote speech was by Robert Metcalfe, the Vice President of Advanced Technology. Though heavily opinionated and somewhat lacking in real substance, this was quite entertaining; the speech was basically a collection of soundbites, including:

"The percentage of people in the World who use the Web rounds to zero"
"The least important subject covered at the conference was creating cool Web pages using HTML" [did think of pointing out that attractive, useful Web sites would make more people use the Web, and help move the aforementioned percentage above zero]
Robert wasn't sure what the most important subject covered, but then later said "Java is the biggest thing to happen since the PC"
"The Web is self-policing - whevever I get near any pornography, the traffic keeps me out"

Robert spent some time predicting that the Web would "collapse" or "enter a dark age" in 1996, but wouldn't say specificially what he believed such an event would occur of.

After Robert came a plug for the 5th WWW Conference, whose official slogan appears to be "Paris in the spring". It seemed a bit bizarre, with the conference only officially beginning 32 hours before, for it to be closing with details of the next one.