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W3C @ WWW6

April 7-11, 1997
Santa Clara, CA


Table of Contents

W3C Gearing Up for Sixth International Web Conference

by Rohit Khare

W3C's history has long been intertwined with the International World Wide Web Conference Series -- starting with W3C's birth at the very first Geneva conference through to its management of WWW4 (Boston) and WWW5 (Paris). In 1997, the WWW6 torch passes to Santa Clara, and W3C will be there in force.

During the week of April 7-11, W3C's worldwide technical staff will participate in workshops and tutorials, a W3C Conference Track, Developer's Day sessions, and in several adjacent W3C Member meetings. This article presents some background on our mission at W3C; please keep an eye on our W3C@WWW6 Overview Page for the latest information. W3C Members are also strongly encouraged to participate in the conference, and in our panels, workshops, and symposia, as described below.

It is worth noting that WWW6, like its predecessors and next year's WWW7 (Brisbane, Australia), are sponsored by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee, not the Consortium.

W3C Conference Track

W3C will be using its main Conference track as an 'Annual Report' to the wider Web Community. Much like the semiannual Advisory Committee reports, this is our opportunity to present and defend our agenda to the community we serve. The W3C track as a whole is a primer on the entire range of our activities:

We hope this agenda will help us reach out to a rapidly expanding constituency who may not be familiar with W3C's origin, scope, or expertise. We will also back up the conference program with our first W3C Folio, a high-quality overview brochure.

Developer's Day & History Day

While many academic, user, and engineering communities converge at WWW conferences, the organizers have traditionally reserved the last day of the week for the truly hard-core, the hackers, protocol developers, and visionaries behind tomorrow's Web technology. WWW6 embraces this charge with an expanded Developer's Day and a brand-new History Day on Friday April 11th.

The new Developer's Day will reach out to new "developer" communities: content providers, business developers, authors, etc. W3C's contribution will focus mainly on the original core, with technical talks from all three Domains. Architecture Domain will host discussions of HTTP/1.1 implementation, performance, and its future at the IETF, along with briefings on real-time and multimedia technology. User Interface Domain is preparing to dissect Amaya and its underlying Thot library, as well as a host of HTML and CSS related developments. Technology & Society Domain's various project team reports will bring together W3C staff and Member organization volunteers to talk to developers about implementing PICS, Digital Signatures, and more.

History Day is an effort to capture the lore and traditions of the seven-year old Web community. W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee will present a joint Keynote speech, "History and Developers" for both of these programs. In addition, W3C staff will be assisting History Day organizers in locating speakers, timelines, and other matters.

Developer's Day was the subject of a recent WWW6 Newsletter feature story, as well.

Resources

There are several ways for Members to keep abreast of Conference activities and W3C's role at the conference. WWW6 itself publishes extensive information about registration, schedules, and accepted papers at its own site. Registered attendees will have access to even more WWW6 information, agenda planning tools, and discussion groups through a new Interactive Conference Environment (ICE), part of the organizing committee's commitment to wiring the conference itself.

Rohit Khare, khare@w3.org, is W3C's primary contact for WWW6 activities. To find out the latest about W3C's participation, see the W3C@WWW6 Overview Page on W3C's public web site. W3C Members can contact Mr. Khare directly to suggest topics, panelists, and speakers in support of W3C's agenda items.


Sunday April 6

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Launch

The WAI Launch on Sunday will help draft the work plan for a new, highly-visible worldwide effort to increase the accessibility of the Web.

More details TBA.

Attendance is strictly closed to W3C Members and invitees.


Monday April 7

Tutorials, Workshops, BOFs

W3C personnel will support several workshops at WWW6. W3C is not organizing any of these workshops directly, nor will they constitute official W3C business.

All participants are W3C staff or W3C Visiting Scientists unless noted otherwise

NOTE There will be a W3C Press Conference on the Web Accessiblity Initiative on Monday April 7 as well.


Tuesday April 8

The W3C Conference Track is an 'annual report': a way to find out more about the entire range of W3C activities and offer feedback from the Web Community to the Consortium.

All participants are W3C staff or W3C Visiting Scientists unless noted otherwise. The links on each event lead to the WWW6 Interactive Conference Environment.

All W3C Track sessions are in the Santa Clara Convention Center Theater unless otherwise noted.

Conference Day #1 ("Everyone")


Today's focus is on the User Interface Domain

W3C: Leading the Evolution of the World Wide Web [slides]
Presented by: Jean-François Abramatic 11:00 - 11:45
W3C Chairman Jean-François Abramatic's keynote will launch the World Wide Web Consortium Track at WWW6. This talk will highlight W3C's mission and unique role in the Web Community. The Consortium has continued its wide-ranging development efforts and global expansion since WWW5 last year in Paris. W3C's internal processes have been strengthened, too. This keynote, and the entire W3C Track, is our 'Annual Report' to the Web Community. We expect to lay out our entire development agenda -- every Project, every Activity Area, in every Domain -- and solicit feedback from the heart of the Web Community.

W3C User Interface Domain: Connecting People with Computers [slides]
Presented by Vincent Quint 11:45 - 12:30
The W3C User Interface Domain seeks to improve all user/computer communications on the Web. In particular, this Domain is working on formats and languages that will present information to users with more accuracy and a higher level of control. This Domain includes the Markup (HTML), Style Sheets, Graphics, Fonts, Internationalization, and Amaya activity areas. Questions about the whole range of UI issues are welcome.

Leading the Evolution of HTML [slides]
Presented by: Dave Raggett, Arnaud Le Hors, Rob Miner 2:00 - 2:45
HTML is a data format for exchanging documents on the Web. It provides interoperability between a number of products that cover a wide range of applications: word processing, collaborative authoring, data base publishing, interactive applications, and more. There is perhaps no more controversial area in Web standards than HTML extensions. W3C plays a vital role in the evolution of HTML by both stimulating development in critical directions and providing a forum where competing parties can meet to reach a consensus about new features.Among the extensions currently under discussion by W3C are rich forms, scripting, frames and subsidiary windows, and mathematical markup.
[Rob Miner is from the Geometry Center: www.geom.umn.edu/about/people/home/rminer.html]

Cascading Style Sheets [slides]
Presented by: Håkon Lie, Chris Lilley 2:45 - 3:30
On the Web, content providers do not have the control they have in print media over color, text indentation, positioning, and other aspects of style. A style sheet language offers a powerful and manageable way for authors, designers and typographers to create the rich visual effects. In December 1996, Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 (CSS1) became a W3C Recommendation. This core specification is being built upon to also support absolute positioning and layering, aural presentation (using a speech synthesizer), improved font capabilities, and better printed output.

Real-Time Audio/Video on the Web
Presented by: Philipp Hoschka 4:00 - 4:45
W3C is working towards better support for interactive and continuous real-time multimedia on the Web, including synchronized audio and video streaming. The Consortium is helping develop new data formats and protocols to support this effort. The speaker may be joined by colleagues from this brand new W3C Working Group.

Amaya: W3C's User Interface Testbed [slides]
Presented by Vincent Quint, Irène Vatton 4:45 - 5:30
Amaya has been designed as a new generation of client software that can integrate all aspects of the Web and still remains user friendly. The main purpose of Amaya is to serve as a testbed to experiment new Web protocols and formats, to test and demonstrate new features proposed for existing Web standards. This presentation will review the design goals, the user experience with the current version and the future directions for this W3C effort.

Birds of a Feather Sessions

Document Object Model
Coordinated by Lauren Wood, SoftQuad 8:00 - 9:30
Santa Clara Convention Center Ballroom G/H
An opportunity for those interested in the Document Object Model being developed by a W3C Working Group to ask questions and exchange ideas with members of the group and each other.

Selection of Payment Vehicle for Internet Purchases
Coordinated by Alan Kotok, GC Tech 8:00 - 9:30
Santa Clara Convention Center Room 209/10
There is good reason to come to some common agreement among those concerned with payment processing on how customers can be presented with their various options when making purchases on the Internet. We feel that customers are more concerned with whether they can pay with a particular "brand" or type of payment vehicle then which protocol they use to process the payment.


Wednesday April 9

Conference Day #2 ("Everything")


Today's focus is on the Technology & Society Domain

Multilingualism and Internationalization [slides]
Panel Discussion with Bert Bos, Håkon Lie, M.T. Carrasco Benitez, European Commission (on leave) 11:00 - 11:45
Having a single system that can deal with all languages and all cultures of the world has many advantages: when the same protocols and data formats are used everywhere, different cultures can use the same software everywhere. Of course, software should still be localized, to make sure that the user interface is understandable and respects local culture. The panel will discuss these issues and present W3C's current efforts and future plans.

W3C Technology & Society Domain: Connecting People [slides 1] [slides 2]
Presented by: Jim Miller 11:45 - 12:30
The explosive growth of technology has forced the entire Web community to look at society's ethical and legal issues from a new international perspective. The Technology & Society Domain seeks to understand these issues in light of new technology -- partly by changing the technology, and partly by educating users about the technology's benefits, costs, and limits. Questions are welcome regarding the entire range of T&S activities: Accessibility, Security, Electronic Commerce, Content Selection, Intellectual Property Rights, Privacy & Demographics, and Public Policy.

JEPI: Report on Phase 1
Presented by: Daniel Dardailler 2:00 - 2:45
Santa Clara Convention Center Room 203/4
This is a report on JEPI, Phase 1, a joint effort of W3C and CommerceNet to explore the process that takes place, typically, after shopping and before actual payment begins. This is the point in time where the exact payment instrument (credit card ala SET, debit card, electronic check, electronic cash, etc.) must be agreed upon between the browsing client and the merchant server, and the transaction can take place. The core technology behind JEPI is of a set of HTTP extensions called PEP and UPP that provides "automatable payment selection" and ultimately enhances the user shopping experience.

The Platform for Internet Content Selection [slides]
Presented by: Paul Resnick, AT&T Research 2:00 - 2:45
PICS started as an industry-wide response to attempts to regulate content on the Internet. It has evolved into a pair of W3C Recommendations that allow content to be labeled in machine-readable form. It provides for both self-labeling (by the author or publisher) and third party labeling. PICS is "value-neutral" in the sense that it does not specify the labeling system, just their format and how they can be transmitted. The PICS work is now entering a second phase, in which the infrastructure created to support the initial goal (content filtering) is being proposed to handle searching and privacy protection tasks which involve content labels.

Entrusting Web Content: The Digital Signature Initiative
Presented by: Philip DesAutels 2:45 - 3:30
The Digital Signature Initiative of W3C was launched in October, 1996. The technical core of the DSig project is to establish a mechanism for a signer to make statements about objects on the web ("Signature Labels") thus enabling users to establish trust in those objects. The Project Manager will describe the overall architecture and report on the progress of several implementation teams.

Everyone's Web: The Web Accessibility Initiative [slides]
Presented by: Daniel Dardailler 4:00 - 4:45
Access to the World Wide Web by people with disabilities could be significantly improved by changes to the Web's supporting protocols, applications and, most importantly, content. In order to fulfill its mission -- to realize the full potential of the Web -- W3C must promote a high degree of usability for people with disabilities. The Consortium will launching a broad new project and an associated International Program Office on April 6, to coordinate five Web-related activities:
  1. Technology development
  2. Development of tools.
  3. Guidelines for use of the technology
  4. Education of content creators
  5. Research and advanced development

Web Communities: Privacy, Property, Propriety, and Public Policy
Presented by: Joseph Reagle 4:45 - 5:30
The Web's success is drawing attention from outside its immediate technical and user community. Governments realize that a significant portion of their constituencies and markets are moving online. Furthermore, as the sophistication of one's interactions on the Web increase, so does its resemblance to the "real world." Consequently, regulators are interested in extending their "real world" mandates on commerce, culture, gambling, money laundering, taxation, data protection, and intellectual property rights to the Web. However, the outcome is often confusing because the applied notions of identity, time, relationships, and location (jurisdiction) do not map to cyberspace. Any resulting fear, uncertainty, or doubt prevents the Web from growing as quickly as its potential merits. W3C is establishing a Public Policy Interest Group as a forum for discussing all of these issues.


Thursday April 10

Conference Day #3 ("Everywhere")


Today's focus is on the Architecture Domain

W3C Architecture Domain: Connecting Computers
Presented by Dan Connolly 11:00 - 11:45
The Architecture Domain is responsible for leading W3C efforts to maintain the seamless and simplification of the globally distributed information space known as the Web. The Domain focuses on automating information exchange so that users are insulated from the technical details of the Web's machine-to-machine communication. Questions are welcome about the entire range of Architecture activities: HTTP, URLs, Object Technology, Caching, Real Time Multimedia, XML, and its sample code (Jigsaw and libwww).

Improving Web Performance: Global Reach [slides]
Presented by: Jim Gettys, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen 11:45 - 12:30
We describe our investigation of the effect of persistent connections, pipelining and link level document compression on several client and server HTTP implementations, including W3C's own Libwww and Jigsaw. The results confirm that HTTP/1.1 is meeting its major design goals. Our experience has been that implementation details are very important to achieve all of the benefits of HTTP/1.1.Furtermore, The use of CSS1 and PNG may result in an equally significant saving in the amount of bytes used to download Web pages.

Extensible Markup Language
Presented by: Jon Bosak, Sun Microsystems, Tim Bray, Textuality 2:00 - 2:45
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is an extremely simple dialect of SGML. The goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. For this reason, XML has been designed for ease of implementation, and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.

W3C: Representing the Web Community
Group Discussion with Jean-François Abramatic, Tim Berners-Lee, Vincent Quint, Jim Miller, Dan Connolly, Sally Khudairi 2:45 - 3:30
In many ways, WWW6 attendees are the heart of the Web Community; W3C is just one of its arms. This special closing session of the W3C track is the Community's chance to offer feedback on W3C's direction and representation.

Evening
PICS working group 'BOF', which is closed to W3C Members and invitees. Chaired by Paul Resnick and coordinated by Susan Hardy

Friday April 11

Developer's Day


Today's focus is on reaching out to hard-core developers.


HTTP Infrastructure

Santa Clara Convention Center Room 203/204

W3C User Interface Innovations

Santa Clara Convention Center Room 209/210

Electronic Commerce (W3C Sessions)

Westin Santa Clara Ballroom 2: Lawrence + San Tomas + Lafayette

Related Developer's Day Presentations

Several more W3C technologies are showcased at WWW6 DDay: Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and the Document Object Model. There's also an exciting all-day Access track in Great America J.

History Day


The Consortium has played a crucial role in the history of the Web...


Rohit Khare