At no time in history has a technology so quickly captured people"s imagination and interest as the Internet"s World Wide Web. Without its historic cooperative, open systems development process, the Internet would not have grown and flourished. Now, the mad rush to use the Web for commerce is on, and the standards process is more important than ever if the Web is to fulfill its vision of a universe of network-accessible information available to everyone. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), led by Tim Berners-Lee, the original visionary for the Web, spearheads standards research and development for the Web. Over 150 member organizations participate in the painstaking work of keeping open access to web information. The World Wide Web Journal provides timely, in-depth coverage of the W3C"s technological developments, such as protocols for security, replication and caching, HTML and SGML, and content labeling. It also explores the broader issues of the Web with web luminaries and articles on controversial legal issues such as censorship and intellectual property rights. Whether you follow web developments for strategic planning, application programming, or web page authoring and designing, you"ll find the in-depth information you need here. The World Wide Web Journal is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. In this issue you"ll find 57 refereed technical papers presented at the the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference, held December 11-14, 1995, in Boston, Massachusetts, as well as the two best papers from regional conferences.