Members of the team were introduced, and the international W3C agreement was elaborated by Albert Vezza of MIT and Jean-Francois Abramatic of INRIA. A forum was provided for speakers from IBM, HP, and CyberCash to present several proposals for payment protocols and spark discussion. Alan Schiffman of EIT spoke about Terisa's policy on security standards, and James Gosling of Sun talked about the push to develop Java as an open standard. Bob Hopgood of Rutherford Appleton Labs asked the W3C to consider endorsing CGM as a recognized format for 2D geometric images.
The members of the W3C team presented summaries of their work, current status, and plans, and gathered feedback on future direction.
Dan Connolly discusses these issues in his article ``Mobile Code and Distributed Objects''
To become more involved and informed in this area, please subscribe to the w3c-tech mailing list (see W3C Member Mailing Lists for details on how to do so).
To RSVP, email the W3C office (tab@w3.org) or call 617/253-2613. This workshop is designed for technological discussion; please include a brief description of any relevant security work you or your organization are involved in.
This is a preliminary announcement of the date and time only. To suggest an agenda item, speaker, or any other questions, please contact Rohit Khare (khare@w3.org, 617/253-5884) or Phillip Hallam-Baker (hallam@w3.org).
For a review of the Consortium's plans, see: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Consortium/Meeting/950522/Security.html
Note the new "member" file tree, which separates W3C member information from the public "hypertext" tree. If you have any difficulties accessing this part of the tree then please mail our webmaster, Karen MacArthur at kmm@w3.org with an IP-address mask.
Information on the Library and the LineMode Browser (and soon the server) is also available in our new member tree, so have a look at:
Henrik announces: "The next prerelease is moving forward. I have now rewritten the local file access and some other stuff so interruptible PUT and POST is possible. We are planning to set up a test server for PUT and POST - you will here more about this when we are ready!"
PLEASE NOTE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MAILING LISTS:
Comments are welcome!
We suggest that individual organizations set up an alias which can be added to W3C mailing lists (e.g. "w3c-tech@foo.com"), so that all interested people in an organization can subscribe locally to these services, as an alternative to funneling all information through a single W3C contact person.
Although the Web has experienced explosive growth as a publication system, it was originally proposed as a collaboration tool. The use of the network for collaboration has of course been a long tradition of the IETF. There is a growing awareness however of a need to move beyond mailing lists and newsgroups.
A large number of sites have experimented with using the Web to create discussion tools, such as Hotwired, WIT and the National Performance Review. Gateways allow access to established collaboration tools such as Lotus Notes and DECnotes. Experience from designers and users of these and similar systems will be essential in the development of standards in this area.
The MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are jointly hosting a workshop in collaboration with W3C titled "Semantics of Wide-Area Collaboration". This will bring together a small group of leading experts in the field. With the objective of identifying the key extensions that will enable an increase in wide-area collaborative applications comparable with that of Web publication applications.
This workshop will take place 11-12 September 1995 at MIT. Please contact hallam@w3.org or kmm@w3.org for details.
Dave Raggett is on secondment from HP Labs. He is editor of the HTML 3.0 specification, and developed the Arena browser as a proof of concept demonstrator for ideas in HTML 3.0. He is the co-chair of the IETF working group for HTTP, which he set up in December 1994. Earlier that year he helped initiate work on extending the Web to support distributed virtual reality. He is also working on exportable/patent free schemes for authentication and micropayments, and HTML style sheets with the ability to download fonts over the Web. He was educated in England and obtained his doctorate at the University of Oxford.
For more information on individual team members and their work, please see People of the W3C.
Notice that other team members are being sought at W3C-MIT and at INRIA. If you are interested in working with W3C-MIT, see our recruiting information.
For INRIA issues please contact Jean Francois Abramatic of INRIA by email at
jean-francois.abramatic@inria.fr.