While the World-Wide-Web is demonstrably useful for a wide variety of tasks, in its current form it lacks support for many wide-area software development activities. This talk presents our experience, and observations drawn by others, in using the WWW as an environment for software development. Based on this, we identify and discuss the following areas for improving the Web to better support wide-area software engineering:

• Support for first-class links, thereby enabling end-user annotation and evolutionary development of relationships within the environment;
• Support for a mechanism by which clients can receive asynchronous notifications of resource changes, which is necessary to support the complex interactions found in software engineering;
• Support for equal access to hypermedia services for client-side viewer applications, thereby facilitating the integration of non-HTML data formats found in software engineering;
• Support for distributed authoring and version control, which is necessary for developers to work within a shared information space;
• Support for flexible control and coordination mechanisms, enabling cooperative software development processes and workflow over the Web.