Some of the world's most informed authorities on the World-Wide Web will be on hand at UniForum '95 in Dallas to give their views in the plenary session "Weaving a Worthwhile Web: The Battle of the Browsers." The plenary is scheduled for 1:30 to 3 p.m. on Thursday, March 16.
The panel, chaired by Edward Taylor, executive vice president of Pencom Systems Inc., will include Tim Krauskopf, vice president of research and development and co-founder of Spyglass, Inc., developer of enhanced Mosaic and visual data analysis tools; Rob Raisch, president of The Internet Co., a consulting firm; and Lisa Thorell, vice president of marketing for Spry, Inc., a provider of connectivity applications for users in multivendor environments.
Despite the title, Thorell's talk on the competing Web browsers will be just part of the plenary session. Raisch will speak on issues of bandwidth and scalability, and Krauskopf will discuss navigating the Web. A fourth speaker may be announced, and the audience will have 20 minutes for questions at the end. "I think it should be a fascinating look into the history, current state of events, and the future of the Web and the impact it will have on people in our industry," Taylor says.
The most controversial of the three promises to be Raisch, who admits he has been called "the anti-Christ of Mosaic." Raisch likes to point out that the currently available bandwidth, and the likelihood of getting it, will keep Mosaic from fulfilling its highest promises. "Rob has always been a bit of a contrarian, so I think everyone else may be standing up and waving the WWW banner and Rob may be giving us all some cause for thought," Taylor says.
Raisch notes that there's an assumption in the mind of the consumer that Mosaic is a tremendous way of accessing loads of high-bandwidth multimedia information, and from the marketer that the Web is a ready and willing marketplace of over 50 million customers eager to spend money. "The problem with those assumptions is that anyone who has used Mosaic on a regular basis, as a highly graphical method of surfing the net, realizes quite quickly that that's a myth" mainly because of the bandwidth bottleneck between the home and the Internet service provider, Raisch says. "The issues of bandwidth availability in this country are interesting to say the least, and until ubiquitous free bandwidth-or close to it-is available, Mosaic will be an excellent way of navigating the wealth of textual information on the Internet, but out of the reach of the typical consumer the moment you start talking about anything larger than ASCII text."
Raisch also believes that the tension between the interests of publishers and site administrators inhibits the growth of bandwidth. "The interests of the publisher are to maintain tight coupling between the product and consumer. The interest of the site administrator is to provide the most efficient access to information possible. I would suggest that those two goals are in opposition to each other. As far as consumer bandwidth goes, ISDN [integrated services digital network] has been deployable in this country for almost 15 years. We have to ask ourselves why we don't have ISDN going into every home in America." The reason, Raisch says, is that the telephone companies are also becoming publishers and want to control what goes over the bandwidth they provide.
"Don't get me wrong," he adds, "I think Netscape and NCSA Mosaic are excellent tools. I just think they're being sold as a pig in a poke."
In addition to the Web plenary, a regular conference session, "What's So Great About the World-Wide Web," is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on March 14, and a pre-conference seminar on the Web is being conducted on March 12 and 13.
For registration information you may: