WWW5

Fifth International World Wide Web Conference

May 6-10, 1996, Paris, France

W3C Sessions


	
[Plenary Sessions] [Invited Speakers] [Paper Sessions] [Panel Sessions]
[W3C Sessions] [Industrial Sessions] [Poster Presentations] [BOFs]

Tuesday 7 May

W3C1: A Comprehensive View of WWW Standards (part 1) (11:30-13:00)
W3C2: A Comprehensive View of WWW Standards (part 2) (14:30-16:00)

[Slides]

Larry Masinter - Xerox Corporation - USA

This State-of-the-art report will survey the current status of Web standards and technologies. The purpose of the tutorial is to help the listener sort out all of the many buzzwords and acronyms in use in the web community, and to describe the current status of all of these bits as they make their way through both de jure and de facto standards processes. Familiarity with the web from a user's perspective will be assumed.

The report will describe the various standards processes, and then cover the status, issues and recent progress around standards for naming and addressing (URLs, URNs, URCs), information content (MIME, character sets), and particular document formats, including the current status of HTML and its extensions and the various image formats. In addition, related Internet technology and the corresponding standards will be described.


Wednesday 8 May

W3C3: Overview of W3C Activities (9:00-9:45)

[Slides]

Vincent Quint - W3C / INRIA - FRANCE

This talk presents the structure of the World Wide Web Consortium, its objectives, and its current activity. The main development areas include security, content labelling, HTTP, HTML, style sheets, payment, demographics, internationalization, etc. W3C also produces reference code that is freely available for any use by anyone.

This talk gives an overview of W3C activities. More details on some key issues are presented in other sessions of the W3C track.

W3C4: HTML & Cascading Style Sheets (9:45-10:30)

[Slides]

HTML: Dave Raggett - W3C / HP - USA

"W3C's role in work on extending HTML"

The talk will cover recent work by W3C in bringing together member companies such as Netscape, Microsoft, Sun, Spyglass, IBM and others to work on interoperable extensions to HTML, for example multimedia objects, style sheets, scripting, extensions to forms, and mathematics. The successor to HTML2 will be unveiled together with the roadmap for ongoing work.

Cascading Style Sheets: Hakon Lie - W3C / INRIA - FRANCE

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, artists and typographers to create the visual effects they want. Also, readers may have special presentational needs that can be expressed in a style sheets.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple style sheet mechanism developed specifically for the Web. The presentation will describe the basic mechanism and give demonstrations of what HTML authoring and browsing can look like when your Web client supports CSS.

W3C5: PEP & PICS (14:30-15:15)

Jim Miller - W3C / MIT - USA

Rohit Khare - W3C / MIT - USA

W3C has an increasing number of projects that arise, not from new technologies, but from the needs of end-users or society in general. W3C helps address these needs by working with others to show how the Web can be used and extending the Web infrastructure as necessary to address them. To illustrate this, we will discuss two of these problems and the technology W3C is introducing to address them: PICS for attaching meta-data to content (originally for labeling content to allow parents to control the content accessible to their children); and PEP for negotiation between clients and servers (used in PICS, and in W3C's work on digitally signed code and documents). Because W3C strives for solutions that have broad applicability (as in the design of the original Web protocols), both PICS and PEP are becoming central to a number of other Web-based solutions.

W3C6: Payment & Security (15:15-16:00)

Jim Miller - W3C / MIT - USA

Rohit Khare - W3C / MIT - USA

With the guidance and support of our security editorial review board, W3C has been working on both general security issues and electronic payment.

Presently, W3C is concentrating its security effort on the problem of requesting and transmitting signed documents (including runnable code). We are working with major software and operating system vendors to design a system that allows signatures to be transmitted either embedded in the document, along with the document, or from a separate third-party service. Drawing on ideas from the Microsoft Code-Signing Initiative, IBM's cryptlopes, and the W3C PICS work, W3C hopes to have a complete solution ready for use in the first quarter of 1997.

The heart of the W3C work on electronic payment is a project: JEPI, the Joint Electronic Payment Initiative. Sponsored by both W3C and CommerceNet, JEPI investigates the back-and-forth negotiation that takes place between the end of shopping (when a customer has decided what to buy) and actual payment. During this negotiation, the customer and merchant must agree on the payment vehicle (credit card, debit card, electronic cash, discount coupons, etc.), payment protocol (SET, etc.) and transport protocol (HTTP, SMTP, etc.). JEPI has a "core team" of engineers from six member companies who have dedicated resources to design a negotiation protocol and provide a complete consumer-to-merchant-to-payment demonstration.

W3C7: W3C Software: Library, Server, Client (16:30-18:00)

[Slides]

Library: Henry Frystyk Nielsen - W3C / MIT - USA

The Web is still growing fast and people are constantly finding new ways to use it and new areas where it can be employed. This puts high demands on existing Web applications to move with these changes, while remaining innovative, and not becoming stale too soon. Therefore, the main question is: What is required in order to develop such extendibility and flexibility of Web applications? The definition of APIs play a large role in answering this question since they provide the means for a standardized and efficient access to Web resources.

The W3C Reference Library, a.k.a. libwww, is a proposal for such an API. The libwww API was designed as a a generic platform for all types of Web applications such as clients, servers, robots etc. It provides a light weight API with support for an open-ended set of features that can easily adjust to new requirements. The presentation will describe the basics of the libwww API and how it can be used in a variety of applications.

Server: Anselm Baird-Smith - W3C / MIT - USA

The talk will focus on the current development of server software at the W3C. The CERN server represented a first generation server, and even though, has reached a stable state and has been widely deployed. The consortium is now working on a second generation server, whose goal is to be flexible enough to allow for easy prototyping of new features. Jigsaw is this experimental server, written in Java.

We will first discuss our goals and motivations, then provide a brief overview of the underlying architecture which is heavily object oriented. This allows its easy adaptation for a wider variety of applications than the serving of static files. We will then describe the current status of Jigsaw, including its first release, and conclude with some possible future directions.

Client: Vincent Quint - W3C / INRIA - FRANCE

Amaya, is a Web client that combines the functionalities of both a browser and an authoring tool. It is intended to experiment the most advanced features of WWW technology and to serve as a basis for developing new software tools.

Amaya offers a WYSIWYG user interface while maintaining a structured representation of HTML documents. The user interface makes it as easy to use as a simple word processor, whereas the structured representation allows powerful operations to be performed and provides a generic framework for adding new features. Extendibility is achieved by a plug in API.


	
[Plenary Sessions] [Invited Speakers] [Paper Sessions] [Panel Sessions]
[W3C Sessions] [Industrial Sessions] [Poster Presentations] [BOFs]

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Created: 12 February 1996
Last updated: 29 May 1996