Today's WWW-tomorrow's MMM? The specter of multi-media mediocrity

The WWW system has reached a crossroads. Since its inception in 1991, it has evolved rapidly from a tool for congenial information-sharing among CERN's high-energy-particle physicists to a channel of communication for anyone with access to the Internet. Web-based information, tracked by dozens of Web crawlers and harvesters, continues to grow exponentially without much thought for guidelines, safeguards, and standards concerning the quality, precision, trustworthiness, durability, currency, and authorship of this information. The situation is untenable. Unless serious and energetic remedial steps are taken at once by managers of the most prestigious and resourceful Web sites, and by as many of the organizations dealing with Web and Internet standards as possible, the system currently known as the WWW may come to be known as the MMM (multimedia mediocrity).