WWW8 Conference Overview
May 24, 1999
The 8th International World Wide Web Conference
was held from May 11-14, 1999 at the Toronto Convention Center in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The conference drew 1,200 people from around the world.
The first day consisted of a choice of one of fifteen half- or full-day tutorials,
or one of five workshops.
The next two days were presentations of various lengths by speakers from the industry and W3C team members.
Paper selection was a highly selective process, with only 48 of the original 304 submissions making the final cut.
The topics presented in these two days were arranged into a number of overlapping categories:
- Electronic marketplace
- Multimedia and user interaction
- XML
- Web server performance
- Customizing Web sites
- Searching and discovery
- Searching and querying 1
- Web document management
- Hypermedia and video
- Searching and mining the Web
- Links
- Server performance
- Electronic commerce, security, and applications
- Searching and querying 2
- Hypertext and hypermedia
- Protocols and performance
- Panel discussions and town meetings
The paper presentations were given in six simultaneous tracks.
See also the
Conference-at-a-glance list.
For a complete list of the presentations given on these two days, see
WWW8 Wednesday Program Details and
the WWW8 Thursday Program Details;
the listings include titles of papers and authors,
although not links to the papers themselves at the time of this writing.
The last day was Developer's Day, organized into eight tracks:
- Web-based Distributed computing
- XML, DOM and Related Technologies
- Databases, Naming, Indexing, and Searching
- Scalable Graphics
- Style Sheets and Formatting
- Accessibility: Software and Design
- Web Scripting Language Forum
- Open Source Software
There were four inspiring and highly spirited
keynote addresses given as
opening and closing plenaries during the middle two days
by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, IBM's VP of Internet Technology, John Patrick, Sun's CTO, Greg Papadopoulos, and
International Data Group's Robert Metcalfe.
In addition, the conference welcomed about 80 poster presentations.
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the web, there was a
History Wall that
included key events in the history of the web; attendees were encouraged to post their
own recollections on the wall. This material will be used for a book to be published in
early 2000 by James Gillies of CERN.
WWW8 was hosted by Foretec Seminars, Inc. and
NRC-CNRC, the National Research Council Canada.
Foretec Seminars, Inc is a subsidiary of the
Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI).
Conference sponsors included Microsoft, IBM, and Sun Microsystems.
Attendees received a wealth of materials, depending upon their registration category. Materials included
335 pages of Tutorial Notes, 700 pages of Conference Proceedings and 175 pages of Poster Proceedings.
In addition, attendees received a CD-ROM containing the Conference Proceedings in both HTML and PDF format.
Interested individuals wishing to locate the paper edition of the proceedings in a library should look for
Proceedings of the Eighth International World Wide Web Conference, Toronto, Canada, 11-14 May 1999,
ISBN 0-444-50264-5.
On the first day,
I attended the first half of the
XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Languages: Transformations) tutorial.
I highly recommend G. Ken Holman's XSL tutorial notes,
which are approximately 200 pages with updates for around $40.
I then attended the second half of the
Web Engineering Workshop,
at which I presented a 20-minute talk,
Using XML and Java for Astronomical Instrument Control.
My manager, David Fout, presented a talk entitled
Data Visualization via the Integration of Java Technologies; copies are available
upon request.
On the second and third days, I shifted between tracks but mainly concentrated on XML-related presentations,
of which there were many.
My Developer's Day was spent in the XML and DOM stream.
WWWhat Happened at WWW8?
WWWhat Happened at WWW8?
Tim Berners-Lee: Challenges of the Second Decade
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