This is the where the role of open standards organizations comes into play. NCSA will work to see that standards underlying current and future capabilities in NCSA Mosaic and World Wide Web systems are open and public. That will provide the most common ground for public and commercial participants in the emerging cyberspace environments, and help insure that users can rely on compatibility across systems. This is very important as this new infrastructure develops. Otherwise, people could quickly become disenfranchised as cyberspace became balkanized by different implementations.
Standards are empowering.
This is nowhere more true than in cyberspace. NCSA will be a charter member of the new organization and supports its related commercial consortium wholeheartedly. Web people about all this, and will do all we can to help the development of open standards through these organizations. We will provide technology, including source, as part of the standards-setting process, and will work to keep an open standards process undergirding WWW client and server development. A large set of papers and posters were presented, representing the vibrant state of World Wide Web development around the world.