By that I mean that I recognize the profound implication of the WEB, not just on the Internet, but on society itself. Having majored in communications, I've read a lot of McLuhan, along with the works of other theorists, such as Landow, and I see the WEB as the reality of their theories. As I became involved in WEB authoring I starting to think about how I, and others in the field went about it. I started to study the good sites I had encountered, and tried to define what made them good, both on a practical and theoretical level. What started as an informal contemplation grew into the formal study which resulted in this site. It is a labour of love, for the WEB has become my greatest love in computing.

 Over the years I have had four transformational experiences in computing. The first was I discovered programming, but it is the other three that are of greater interest here. 1988 was a profound year, for it is when I discovered both multimedia and the Internet. Then, they were two distinct phenomena. In the Fall of 1991, I first encountered the WEB, logging on to the CERN site and using the line mode browser. At the time I didn't get it, I looked to Gopher and WAIS as the solutions to taming the Internet.

 In the Summer of 1993, I saw my first demonstration of X-Windows Mosaic on a SUN workstation. The experience was profound, this was it, the coins of hypertext, multimedia, and the Internet that had been jingling in my head since 1988, fell together in a neat stack. This is what I wanted to be involved in. I felt sad that, at the time, you needed a UNIX workstation to run Mosaic, all I had then was a Classic II. That sadness turned to joy when I got my first copy of Mosaic for the Mac in the spring on 1994. In the Summer of 1994 I started to learn HTML, and was impressed by its power and simplicity.

 At the end of November 1994, I became professionally fully committed to the WEB by quitting my day job to become a full-time Internet consultant. I had come home...