W3C: you know, HTML and all that

• Technologies
  • XHTML, CSS, MathML, SVG, SMIL (Interaction Domain)
  • RDF, XML D-Sig (Technology and Society)
  • XML Schema, SOAP (Architecture Domain)
• Integrated approach
  • Internationalization
  • Web Accessibility
  • Web Architecture (TAG)

The Evolutionary Cycle

• Research
• Prototyping
• Standardization
• Deployment

Community Scale

• design by 1 or 2 or a few
• development by a dozen or so
• review by a few hundred
• early adoption by communities of various sizes
• global consensus

Getting into the Web

What was the tipping point— the killer app—for you?

• for Tim Berners-Lee's colleagues at CERN: a cross-platform phone directory
• for me at Convex in 1991: a nifty hypertext system design:

  Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
  Subject: WorldWideWeb: Summary
  Date: 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT
  
  		WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary
  
  The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval
  and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information
  system. ...
  

• in the early 1990s: NCSA What's New
• these days: maps, auctions, wikipedia, webmail, ...

Two Early Perspectives on the Web

• Tim Berners-Lee: browser/editor started with "my home page"
  (screenshot)
• Marc Andreessen: NCSA "What's New"

Architect for participation -- Tim O'Reilly @ W3C's 10 anniversary Dec 2004

See Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee, 1999

1991 ACM Hypertext Conference, San Antonio, Texas

• Douglas Engelbart
  • not interested to preach to the converted hypertext research audience
  • he was interested to get large enterprises to actually use this stuff.
• Tim Berners-Lee
  • Paper was rejected
  • The Web was too simple to be interesting; it didn't even guarantee two-way link consistency.

For more on these minimally constraining design guidelines that allowed the Web to spread the way it did: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004

Food for thought: blogging tools support aspects of the scholarly record: blockquote, cite, and permalinks.

1994: HTML Validation Service

• Open Source is nice, but...
• Download, configure, compile is not consumer technology.
• Zero-install software
  • reducing the time-cost of change
  • delegating tasks to the machine

1994: Industry picks up the Web

In April 1994, Kotok, Steve Fink, Gail Grant and Brian Reid from DEC travelled to CERN in Geneva to speak with Berners-Lee about the need for a consortium to create open standards and to coordinate Web development.

Wikipedia on Kotok

1995: What they don't teach Computer Science students

Trust is built when you're close enough to punch someone and you don't.

Michael Dertouzos

• Engineering:

  Right Thing /n./

  That which is compellingly the correct or appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc.

  The New Hacker's Dictionary

• Management: setting and managing expectations

1995: breaking out of the IETF

• Netscape and the IPO "quiet period".
• Constituencies:
  • ISO: countries
  • IETF: individuals
  • W3C: organizations

The Web is for Everyone

• 1997: W3C launches Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
• 1998: XML and Internationalization (Unicode)

W3C Royalty-Free Patent Policy

• Oct 2001: 1000 public comments on a draft of the W3C patent policy.
• We read them all.
• Does the Web need a central market maker?
  • Mostly I work on decentralization, but...
  • Interface with the traditional copyright and patent legal systems.

The W3C patent policy is, arguably, more important to the modern information society than XML or CSS or any of the technologies developed at W3C.

Getting involved in W3C

• A lever for changing the world:
  • Technology transfer
  • Collaboration at many scales
  • Policy, governance

Economics and information theory

Crime at a distance. Tragedy of the commons?

• March 2006: W3C security workshop
  • Spam reduces consumer confidence and threatens growth
  • Nice web site you got there; it would be a shame if something happened to it.
• B. Laurie and R. Clayton. Proof-of-work proves not to work. The Third Annual Workshop on Economics and Information Security, May 2004.

  The current definitive analysis of proof of work is a paper by Ben Laurie and Richard Clayton that looks at the amount of compute power available to spammers who use zombies compared to legitimate mailers who don't, and concludes that any proof of work system demanding enough to deter spammers would prevent a significant number of legitimate users from sending their mail.

  John R. Levine, 10 Jul 2006

Semantic Web Architecture

Are there parts of traditional logic and databases that, if we set them aside, will result in viral growth of the Semantic Web?

	Web	Semantic Web
Traditional Design	hypertext	logic/database
+	URIs
-	link consistency	global consistency?
=	viral growth

WikiConsensus and timezones

• iCalendar files have copies of timezone rules
• U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) changes the rules, outdating those files
• U.S. DOE to publish rules in to the Semantic Web... when?
• Meanwhile, wikipedia did it "for free"
• WikiConsensus, a form of consent of the governed
• for more...
  • March 2006: Semantic Web Interest Group meeting in Cannes Mandelieu, France
  • Toward Semantic Web data from Wikipedia in my MIT research group blog
  • Semantic MediaWiki project/community

Loyalty and Remote Presence

• working remotely since 1997
• meta-university: much discussed, e.g. The Research Library in the 21st Century symposium at U.T. Austin
• Recruiting
• What brought us here to Duke today? Friday-night basketball games

  Don't forget the value of get-together-and-go-crazy events in building community, trust, and loyalty.