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w e a v i n g t h e w e b

this angle too much, however. Although SGML had been adopted as a standard by the ISO, it was not well defined as a computer language. I also got a strong push back from many people who insisted that it would be too slow. I had to explain that the only reason SGML was slow was the way it had historically been implemented. Still, I often had to demonstrate the World Wide Web program reading an HTML file and putting it on the screen in a fraction of a second before people were convinced.

Some people were intrigued, but many never accepted my argument. Rather than enter into useless debate, I simply forged ahead with HTML and showed the Web as much as possible. Robert and I held a few colloquia open to anyone in our divisions. We also told people about it at coffee. Occasionally, a group of people getting ready to do an experiment would call to say they were discussing their documentation system, and ask if I could come over and give them my thoughts about it. I'd meet a group of maybe twenty and show them the Web, and perhaps they wouldn't use it then, but the next time through they'd know about it and a new server would quietly come into being.

Meanwhile, Robert and I kept putting information on the info.cern.ch server, constantly upgrading the basic guide to newcomers on how to get onto the Web, with specifications and pointers to available software.

I continued to try to get other organizations to turn their hypertext systems into Web clients. I found out about a powerful SGML tool called Grif, developed by a research group at the French lab INRIA, which ran on Unix machines and PCs. A company by the same name, Grif, had since been spun off in nearby Grenoble, and I was hopeful its leaders would entertain the idea of developing a Web browser that could also edit. They had a beautiful and sophisticated hypertext editor; it would do graphics, it would do text in multiple fonts, it would display the SGML structure and the formatted document in two separate windows, and allow changes to be made in either. It was a perfect match.