trip report from the seventh World Wide Web conference in brisbane, QLD, australia the gathering place

table of contents:

this report was updated daily during the conference, final update: 29-may-1998.

1. introduction
2. general comments
3. tutorial day
4. first day
5. second day
6. third day
7. developer's day
8. documentation
9. other trip reports

introduction:

april 9-11, 1998: zürich - bombay - hong kong - cairns - brisbane

philipp and i met at the airport zürich at 18:00. at check in, we were told that swissair had upgraded our economy class tickets to business class as an "easter present". this means we fly in the upper deck of the boeing 747 in a very convenient environment. we certainly liked and enjoyed that very much. we left zürich shortly after 21:00. 7.5 hours later we made a short stop over in bombay, india. only 75 minutes later, we were in the air again on our way to hong kong, on the same plane, but with a different crew. we had the opportunity to visit with the crew in the cockpit for a while. we did not only watch some oncoming planes below us, but we also learned that the body of the jumbo jet gets heated up from -50 degree C to -6 degree C due to the enormous friction of the air. the flight to hong kong took another 4.5 hours. when we landed, it was 17:00 local time.
shortly after 20:00, we left hong kong on board of a quantas boeing 767 which finally took us to brisbane with another stop over in cairns. we arrived at our final destination around 8:15 local time. when we got out of the plane, it was about 27 hours since we left zürich, this was quite a journey !

april 12, 1998: brisbane

it's close to 30°C outside and my GPS reports
latitude S 27° 28.6' / longitude E 153° 1' / altitude 80 m
there is no doubt: this is brisbane !
today we tried to get adjusted to the local environment and habits. activities included: breakfast buffet, sightseeing, swimming at the beautiful, artificial sand beach, exercise in the gym room and diner. i also saw mr. jean-françois abramatic from INRIA sitting in a nice beach restaurant, so i guess i'm at the right place for the oncoming converence.

april 13, 1998: brisbane

today, i saw dave raggett, the author of the HTML specifications - including the latest HTML V4.0 - at the breakfast buffet. so the important people seem to come in.
our bodies have adapted quite well to the 8 hours time shift so we decided to do some more extensive sightseeing. we boarded the "city cat", a catamaran that runs on the brisbane river zick-zacking its way from one end of the city to the other. first we rode upstream to the terminal station at the university of queensland. we stayed on board and drove downstream do the other end of the route near the harbor. on the way back to the center of the city, we disembarked the cat at the financial district and visited some places of interest by foot. after having strolled through the botanical garden, we took another boat across the river back to the south banks. after all this travelling, there was only one place to be: the swimming pool. later on, we had diner and got ready for the first day of the conference tomorrow: the tutorials.

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general comments:

general comment no 1: HTML code of the WWW7 website:

i do appreciate the fact that they provide frameless versions of the web pages. pages without frames are much easier to download for local copies. however, i am very concerned about the quality of the HTML code. as an example, the page tutselections.htm produced with Microsoft FrontPage 2.0 is a typical example of bad HTML code. it starts with the fact that the title "boo" is quite meaningless. in addition and more important, this document is 249 kB in size, a huge document with a lot of useless coding in it. for example, my entry looks like this:

this is the source code:

    :
    <tr>
        <td valign="bottom"><font face="Arial">ambuehler</font></td>
        <td valign="bottom"><font face="Arial">reto</font></td>
        <td align="center" valign="bottom"><font face="Arial">TF01</font></td>
        <td align="center" valign="bottom"><font face="Arial">none</font></td>
        <td align="right" valign="bottom"
        style="vnd.ms-excel.numberformat:m/d/yy"><font face="Arial">3/2/98</font></td>
        <td align="center" valign="bottom"
        style="vnd.ms-excel.numberformat:h:mm:ss AM/PM"><font face="Arial">3:26:47 PM</font></td>
    </tr>
    :

for each and every field in this table, the same attributes for the font and the alignments are defined over and over again, plus a large definition for the date format. the real information is only a small fraction of the whole document. a waste of resources, especially network bandwidth.
this entry could be reduced from 516 bytes to 116 bytes without loosing any information at all:

reduced source code:

    :
    <tr>
        <td>ambuehler</td>
        <td>reto</td>
        <td>TF01</td>
        <td>none</td>
        <td>3/2/98</td>
        <td>3:26:47 PM</td>
    </tr>
    :

i wonder if we will see better HTML code next year, when softquad is one of the hosts of the 8th WWW conference.

general comment no 2: Internet cafe:

the Internet cafe - sponsored by Sun Microcomputer - was supposed to open in the evening of april 14. but even at april 15 noon, not a single workstation was up and running. it is well known that the Sun goes down every day, but here in brisbane the Sun doesn't even raise. this is the poorest performance of a connectivity provider i have experienced ever - hopefully they find a real networking company for WWW8 ...

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april 14, 1998: tutorial day:

the full day tutorial i attended today was titled "a comprehensive introduction to XML". i learned what the basic features of the eXtensible Markup Language are, such as the ability to define ones own declarations and attributes, having links with multiple targets and multiple directions etc. details can be found in a separate document.
unfortunately, the tutorials were not held at the beautiful convention center where everything had been under one roof, but they took place on the campus of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). the sessions were held in different buildings and lunch was served outdoors. it was raining cats and dogs all day long, so everyone was soaked by the end of the day, even though the tables were covered with tents. there certainly is a difference between queensland and california !

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april 15, 1998: 1st day of the conference:

• opening session:
  i guess there were approximately 1000-1200 attendees.
  
  the opening ceremony started with three dances by aborigines: a welcome dance, a fishing dance and a farewell dance. it was followed by a wonderful performance of australian singers backed up by a chorus.
  
  in his welcome message, the hon david watson of the state government queensland, said:
  • it shall become possible to conduct business with the government 24h electronically
  • every school will be connected to the Internet by the end of the year
  
  
  the conference was then officially opened by his excellency the honourable sir william deane, governor-general of the commonwealth of australia, who
  • mentioned that attendees came from 34 different countries
  • expressed a lot of concerns about abuse of the web
  
  
  first keynote by tim berners lee, director of the W3C:
  • his message: evolvability ("futureproof")
  • HTML future: transition to XML
  • partial understanding is sufficient most of the time
  at the end of the opening session, the southern cross university gave a doctor title to tim !
  
  second keynote: john patrick, VP IBM Internet technologies
  this was his third talk at a WWW conference.
  
  his visions include:
  • connectivity everywhere, in the office, at home, in the car, at the kiosk
  • the individual will set the schedule, doing business at any time they like
  • web-centric marketing will become important in the future
  for more details, visit his homepage.
  
  
• W3C session stream:
  this stream of presentations started with an overview of the W3C activities since the last conference. it was followed by a report of the recent work done in the architectural domain, including HTTP-NG, Jigsaw and SMIL - please find the details here.
  
  
• distributed diner:
  because there was probably no restaurant in brisbane large enough to accommodate all participants, the conference diner took place in about ten different locations. it turned out that the italian restaurant we have chosen was quite nice and we enjoyed the company at our table very much.

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april 16, 1998: 2nd day of the conference:

• W3C session stream:
  overview of the work done in the user interface domain.
  there was also an interesting and entertaining speech by cathy marshall about reading, annotation, gathering and collaboration on and beyond the web.
  
  
• world record attempt for the world's largest Internet cafe:
  approximately 100 Sun workstations and more than 70 people with notebooks - including me - set a record for the world's largest Internet cafe (see the ETHZ/UNIZH delegates on the very right in the 4th row). after a lot of hassles, we ended up with 172 simultaneous connections to the web.

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april 17, 1998: 3rd day of the conference:

• opening address by frans de bruïne, europe commission:
  europe's way to the information society.
• keynote by paul saffo:
  paul gave an interesting and very entertaining talk about the business opportunities especially for small companies on the web.
• the yuri rubinski award was presented to ted nelson
• W3C session stream:
  overview of the work done in the technology & society domain.
• W3C town hall:
  the W3C management answered questions from the floor.
• closing session:
  • award presentations: best poster, best paper and IBM Java brainwave prize
  • keynote by barry jones, national president of the australian labor party
  • handover to the WWW8 conference chairs. the 8th WWW conference will take place on may 11-14, 1999 in toronto, canada. WWW9 will be held at amsterdam, nederlands in the year 2000.

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april 18, 1998: developer's day:

• keynote by james gosling - Sun Microsystems:
  his message is: distributed applications must be able to handle errors and poor network performance.
• DSig: digital signature:
  DSig is based on content labeling (PICS). the author, the labeler and the signer need not to be the same entities.
  example of digitally signing a document:
  1. create a PICS label
  2. compute the hashes of the document
  3. sign the label
  the specification are available from W3C website.

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documentation:

• the proceedings and other information are available on the Web.
• a printed version of the proceedings plus information about XML are available at my office (RZ E3).
• see also the trip report of my colleague roberto mazzoni at the university of zürich
  
  
• after the conference, me and my fellow-worker philipp rütsche spent two more weeks in australia. if you are interested in that trip, see my "tagebuch" (written in german)

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trip reports from previous conferences:

• trip report from the 6th WWW conference in santa clara, CA, USA, 7-11 april 1997
• trip report from the 5th WWW conference in paris, france, 6-10 may 1996
• trip report from the 4th WWW conference in boston, USA, 11-14 december 1995
• trip report from the 3rd WWW conference in darmstadt, germany, 10-14 april 1995
• sorry, but i missed the 2nd WWW conference in chicago, USA !
• trip report from the 1st WWW conference in geneva, switzerland, 25-27 may 1994

production note:

this trip report was written on a SHARP HC-4500A running Windows CE with Pocket Word and is supposed to be HTML V4.0 compliant.

WWW7_main.html / 01-jan-2005 (ra) / reto ambühler