The World-Wide Web: Big and Getting Bigger

Plenary panel probes Web's successes, shortcomings

The promise, the reality, and the future of the World-Wide Web got an expert examination at UniForum '95 from an industry panel closely connected to that mushrooming segment of the Internet.

The encompassing nature of the topic was summed up by panel chairman Edward Taylor, executive vice president of Pencom, Inc., who told the capacity audience, "The Web has the potential to provide the embodiment of human knowledge available to anyone, anywhere, at any time."

Taylor summarized usage of the Internet as follows: 27.5 million users exchanging e-mail; 13.5 million users of interactive services on 3.5 million machines; 7.8 million providers of interactive services on 2.5 million machines. The potential market for Web browsers was sketched by panelist Lisa Thorell, vice president of marketing for Spry, Inc.: 6 million Web users today out of a total of 120 million installed personal computers. The number of Web users is doubling each year, according to at least one study.

That's a market clearly of interest not only to makers of Web browsers and server tools, but potentially to every company in the world with a product to sell. As recently as June 1993, only 20 companies had home pages on Web servers; today there are hundreds. With two-thirds of all Web home pages having been added in the last three months alone, Taylor said. "Soon you'll be hard-pressed to find a major corporation in this country not represented on the World-Wide Web."

Even with its phenomenal growth, the Web has contradictions, Thorell pointed out. While the myth is that it provides a virtual storefront, most customers and advertisers have yet to find their way onto the Web. The myth is that almost everyone has a Web browser, but really only the "intelligentsia" do, she said. The myth is that anyone can sell anything on the Web, but the reality is that there's still no billing system and no agreed-on standards for transaction security.

But while commerce on the Web is still a long way from maturity, the early adopters are there, Thorell noted-notably magazine publishers and alliances such as the DealerNet automobile dealerships, which sell cars to each other over the Web. "We do see commerce as a reality today," she said.

Stages of Maturity

For Tim Krauskopf, vice president of Spyglass, Inc., the most telling method of gauging the Web's maturity is examining its navigation methods. File transfer protocol (FTP) was previously the most popular method of retrieving information before the Web, but it was inaccessible to all but the technically skilled. Now, with the Web, "We love the way the text comes across, but we find ourselves in trouble again because there's no hierarchical map," Krauskopf said. Web users now have to scan lists of all servers, index servers such as Yahoo, or their own hot lists that they create on their browsers.

The Web is maturing in stages, of which the "middle-aged Web" is the current incarnation, he said. Krauskopf described the early Web-of two years ago-as simply "I link to you, you link to me," with the "What's New" page of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) providing the most popular method of finding out what was where. "When the numbers were smaller and everything was new, this was the navigation system of choice," he said. "Nearly everyone navigated by finding out what's new."

The middle-aged Web provides addresses in the form http://www._____.com (or org or edu), where the user can fill in the blank with a company or institution name and have a fair chance of finding a home page. Frequent Web users put index servers on their hot lists-for example, www.gnn.com for O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator, lycos.cs.cmu.edu for the Lycos web crawler, and www.yahoo.com for Stanford's Yahoo index.

While some say there's chaos on the Web, "I don't think there's that much more chaos than in a library, bookstore, or yellow pages," Krauskopf said. A mature Web will provide tour guides, allowing users to link to certain lists and magazines that then help them navigate through other sources, much like a skilled librarian would, he said.

A Skeptical View

The skeptic of the panel was Rob Raisch, president of the Internet Co., a consulting firm. For Raisch, the Web is a long way from fulfilling what some advocates have promised. While potential advertisers have been promised control over presentation, "Web tools are user-driven, not publisher-driven," he said. Advertising is made effective by good position and distribution, but Web users can easily ignore on-line ads. Consumers "do not go to a publication and say 'Please give us your advertising,' Raisch noted. In addition, the rich multimedia content promised on the Web is hard to download and can't be triggered automatically.

The critical issues of Web development are navigation, scalability, and bandwidth, Raisch said. The newer browers are only a partial solution to the navigation issue, and Web users still can't be certain they'll be able to link to a server when they need to. Getting to information quickly is a bandwidth problem, and one users aren't likely to solve soon. "We're not going to get it unless we demand it," he said. "If you need high bandwidth, do not pass Go. Go directly to your public utility company and demand it.