WWW is always an interesting conference. The range of relevant topics is quite wide, from cache-and-network type stuff for optimizing performance to speculative artificial-intelligence-type ideas, to sociological analysis and theory of what people actually do on the web. And so, going from one poster to another, or slipping out of your usual track into some other talk can be surprising, with the sometimes benefit of jolting you into a new idea.

The other interesting thing about WWW is that it does represent, in some ways, much of the brainpower at the center of web developments. Many of the people involved in standards and so on are there, and many of today's papers will be tomorrow's hot new ideas. On the other hand, so much of what happens on the web and affects it for regular users makes no appearance among the pointy-headed types at all. Some of it is just secretive (e.g., Google is well-represented at these things, but they never talk about what they're doing) and some of it just pays no attention to research papers (e.g., most ecommerce, publishing, and daily stuff that people use).

The tension here appears all the time, for example in the contrast between all the cool research ideas people have for search and data extraction, and what people actually do every day. Or the contrast between what WWWers hope to do with the semantic web and the reality of how much attention span most people have for such complexity. Or in the way that search engine response time and ease-of-use has basically eclipsed many clever ideas that would be too costly to add.

If pressed, I'd say this kind of contrast appears in many areas of computer science, the tension between what researchers can think of and what people actually will/do use. But it's all much more obvious at WWW, perhaps just because it's so widely used and develops so quickly and seems more like a force of nature (or, at least, an organic entity like a city or a nation) than a human-designed artifact. A lot of the time, we are just trying to keep up with its relentless development.